


come as you are

by silentwalrus



Series: Bucky Barnes Gets His Groove Back & Other International Incidents [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Colonel Rhodes Doesn't Start Fights He Ends Them, Did You Know The FBI Is Unionized?, Full Steve Ahead, M/M, Politics, Sam Makes Some Calls, Seagulls - Freeform, Steve Makes Some Calls, The Wilsons, do not repost to another site
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-01-23 14:53:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18552022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: Steve comes back to the States. He pursues truth, justice and the American way.Bucky comes back too. He pursues inebriation and intercourse.





	1. right from the start

**Author's Note:**

> finally..... it's... here... [wheeze]
> 
> a thousand blessings upon quietnight, who is basically this fic's second parent at this point, and to aggressivewhenstartled for beta
> 
> as usual, no strict posting schedule, but we're trying this whole "shorter chapters, faster updates" thing.

Sierra, upon coming home, wastes absolutely no time coming down with the flu. Then, in the finest traditions of big sisters everywhere, she passes it to Sam. This happens approximately forty minutes after Sam and Steve walk through the Wilson family threshold, pinpointing the moment of transmission to her _hey bro glad you ain’t dead yet_ annual hug, and whatever bug Sierra’s carrying joins forces with Sam’s Year Of Global Travel Avec Terrorist Hunting and promptly knocks him on his ass.

Sam, as someone who has gotten sick literally four times in his life, wallows in the strange waters of snot along with the unfortunately all too familiar waters of inter-sibling resentment. The only consolation is that Sierra is sniffling and hacking and oozing along with him.

His mom, who he’s pretty sure has never been sick ever in her life, just laughs at them and their quarantine camp on the living room couch. His dad adds a lot of tea and honey and lemons to the grocery haul and reminds them of the existence of the Wii. Steve actually makes the tea - _thank god_ figuring out the kettle and determining precise ratios of lemon and honey stops him from hovering in a corner like the ghost of a rabid border collie - and when he brings it over he makes the mistake of sitting down to squint confusedly where they’re ruining each other in MarioKart. When Sam and Sierra realize he’s basically a giant heating pad they wordlessly conspire to trap him on the couch. Dad keeps the winter household temperature maybe ten degrees warmer _than the ice-blasted hellscape outside,_ because he and Mom are freaks who believe in festive seasonal sweaters but not in gas bills. Even Barf steps up his cling game, which Sam did not think was possible.

“Barf?” Steve said, when his own Welcome To The Wilsons hug was performed by Sam’s Mom’s labradoodle launching himself ecstatically into Steve’s arms. “You named your dog _Barf?”_

 _“Mom_ named _her_ dog _Bartholomew Zebulon Wilson,_ and I did him a god damn favor,” Sam said, which made his mom’s first face-to-face words to him “Swear jar!”

In any case Steve handled Barf trying his best to put his buttlicking tongue up Steve’s nose very well, and while Barf is usually of the opinion that every stranger is his new best friend he’s especially taken a shine to Steve. Right now he’s parked himself on Steve’s feet, his tail thumping from time to time whenever Steve or Sierra talks.

“Y’know, you, you’re a lot alike,” Sam mumbles. A mighty and extensive honk echoes from the other end of the couch as Sierra blows her nose.

Steve glances at her, then at Sam, then at the dog. “Who?”

“You two,” Sam says, waving a hand. “You. Sierra. You don’t care about anything ‘cept when you do and then it’s like _damn, whoa_ . Y’all don’t give _a shit_.”

“I so give a shit,” Sierra growls, ruined by how she sneezes four times immediately after.

“S’whatI’msayin’. You, when you give a shit, you _give that shit_ , knowhattimean? You give the _whole entire shit._ None left over. S’why you two don’t give a goddamn ‘bout the other stuff, everybody worrying ‘bout their hair or their clothes, do they like me, does everybody think I’m uncool. Y’all don’t care. Y’all are _so uncool_ and y’all _don’t care._ ”

“Fuck you, I’m cool,” Sierra groans, but she doesn’t bother to open her eyes and the used tissue she throws at him bounces off Steve’s bicep.

“You are fundamentally uncool,” Sam informs her. “You _edit Wikipedia.”_

“No more cough syrup,” Sierra declares croakily. “Captain America, Sam gets no more cough syrup.”

“Sure,” Steve agrees, in what Sam deems to be a far too sarcastic tone of voice. He thumps weakly at Steve’s hip with one wool-socked foot. “Hey! Withholding humanitarian aid! Illegal!”

“I’m not listening to any more codeine-fueled psychoanalysis,” Sierra announces. “Denied.”

“It’s not like you give a damn either,” Steve says to Sam, trying to prevent his attacks with a couch pillow before finally picking up Sam’s besocked feet and trapping them in his lap.

“Hell no. I give _many damns._ S’how you get _popular,_ guys. S’how - s’how I do my job, y’know, you gotta care about the little stuff.” Sam, whose blood composition is currently 75% Nyquil, still somehow manages to not say the next thought, which is _that’s why y’all don’t have any friends._ It’s - well, it’s true, but not that true, and anyway Steve has like… three whole friends. And he has Sam, who has claimed the title of Best Friend by virtue of spending a literal year traveling the world with the guy and the original Best Friend having been bumped up to Common Law Husband.

Sierra has friends too probably, though maybe the closest she’s gotten so far is “competition she hasn’t crushed yet”.

“Plus I can fly,” Sam adds, as an afterthought. “I got wings, that’s cool as shit.”

“Wow, we get it, you’re a fuckin’ jock,” Sierra says snottily.

“And Sam, baby, that was six times you said shit just now, so that’ll be twelve dollars in the swear jar,” Mom says from the kitchen. “At your leisure, of course.”

“Mooooom!”

-o-

They get nearly two weeks of peace, probably because nobody in Congress wants Steve to ruin their Christmas. Steve tries to say something about not wanting to impose but Sam’s mom looks at him until he mumbles off into silence, which Sam wishes he’d videotaped for posterity and also personal mom points. As it is Steve gets situated front and center in the Wilson Holiday Photo, his eyes only a little unhinged and his shoulders straining the seams of his fresh-off-the-rack festive holiday sweater. “Try and look a little less like you’re trying to kill us all with your mind, baby,” Mom tells Sierra, so even she brings out her most benevolent grimace. Mom uploads it into the Costco holiday card maker with the serenely satisfied look of a woman who’ll have to send out her Christmas cards extremely late but doesn’t care because it’ll feature Captain America sandwiched between her two relentlessly overachieving children.

Christmas is a way more low-key deal this year than usual, what with the media attention and Congress and all, so instead of the usual drive down to North Carolina they stay at home and argue about whether the Lambo counts as Sam’s Christmas present to Mom or not. Sam most definitely thinks so, because it was his first-aid stitches and ipod that paid for its arrival, while Dad and Sierra loudly declare that since it’s Tony Stark’s actual real life dollars that “paid” for the car it doesn’t count.

They all get to emotionally terrorize Steve with presents, which more than makes up for the contention. He looks more and more cornered with every pair of Captain America socks, Captain America headphones, Captain America hat and Captain America bedsheets they give him; their genuine smiles and careful wrapping say _gifts_ but the gifts themselves say _merciless hazing_ and Steve’s natural instinct to haze back is clearly running headfirst into the fact that this is _Sam’s mom._ Sierra even gets Steve a Captain America snuggie, because despite their differences she is truly Sam’s sister and delivers when push comes to shove.

Steve’s gift to them all is pencil-drawn portraits - Mom and Dad with Barf, Sierra as Wonder Woman, Sam as Superman - which Sam can only assume Steve drew in the dead of night like some kind of extremely buff house elf while everyone was sleeping, because he definitely didn’t see Steve doing any of these. It’s also hysterical that Steve gave Sierra’s Wonder Woman outfit tac pants instead of the leotard, but Sierra looks like she likes it, or at least isn’t planning on strangling Steve in his sleep.

It’s a pretty quiet holiday. The firestorm of media generated by Steve’s return has been slightly hijacked by 1) a White House intern staging a wild but extremely inept assassination attempt on the President and 2) Christmas. Sam’s mom is two seconds away from adopting Steve, so he currently has no listed residence for journalists and paps to unearth and ambush him at. Sam’s listed residence is currently occupied by a nice Gujarati couple with a baby on the way, so he’s also kind of off the grid. Whatever Maria Hill did to protect his parents while he was gone is still holding, because their house hasn’t been swarmed either. The entire extended Wilson clan knows that to talk to reporters in this case is to be a little snitch, so there’s no angle there. It can’t last forever, but it’s holding for now.

Steve’s also not wild about hiring a PR firm or agent or whatever it’s gonna have to be. When Sam brings it up Steve puts his hands over his face, tipping on the couch. “I’ll do it,” he says, muffled. “Just. When I find a good one.”

“How do people find this sort of thing, anyway?” Sam asks. “Do you just Yellow Pages it? Go on google?”

“The smart thing would be to ask Stark,” Steve says, hands still over his face.

“And you don’t want to?”

“No. I will. But. Not right now. It’s Christmas, and…”

“And you don’t want to start the whole circus while the tinsel’s barely up yet?”

“I’m sure everyone else would like to enjoy their holidays in peace too,” Steve says in his Captain America Can’t Say Fuck voice, hands sliding down.

“You _really_ don’t wanna do this,” Sam observes.

“I’ve done press before,” Steve says. “It’s a lot of traveling. Meeting strangers. Making nice with people you want to hit with a chair.” He sighs. “I want to at least get a place somewhere first, but… maybe that doesn’t make sense, if I’m just gonna get shipped all over the place after.”

“Nah, man, you promised JB,” Sam says. “You gotta set up a crash pad. Besides, where am I supposed to stay when I visit you?”

Sam still doesn’t know if it’s gonna be a crash pad situation or if he’s gonna move his whole ass up to New York with Steve too. He doesn’t want to interrupt the lease on the family currently renting his own house, and increasingly, he’s realizing, he doesn’t want to be that far from Steve. The guy’s his best friend. Sam has friends in DC, sure, but he has friends in Denver and LA and Salt Lake City and the Bronx, and more to the point he just spent a whole year completely international. It’s not like he’s gonna be drastically missed.

He’d more or less abandoned Facebook after Riley died - he’d logged on three weeks after and the first thing he saw was a memorial service details post from Riley’s mom, after which he closed the tab and hasn’t gone back since - and he’s not a dumbass so he hasn’t been updating his insta while on the fucking run. A couple of his bar buddies and his friends at the VA have texted him, asking if he died or moved to Tibet or eloped with a stripper or what, and Sam had replied to them all that her name was Candie and they were _in love_ and that everyone would be welcome at their housewarming, once they actually got a house to warm. (Sam can’t wait to introduce Steve as the hot blond he ran away with.)

So Sam hasn’t totally fallen off the map either, but it’s still a shock to be reinjected into normal human society like this. It’s a shock he has some practice with, though: it’s not wholly different from what it’s like to come off deployment. Between dealing with his own sandbox hangovers and helping other vets with theirs he’s got it down.

And Steve is definitely showing some of the signs. He acts in the Wilson house the same way he acted in every hotel room and hostel and apartment they stayed in: during the day the guest room occasionally looks like a bomb went off, but before bed Steve gathers everything up, packs it up tight and lines it up by the bed. Go bag, nice and ready. Steve came here right off the Western Front, Sam remembers. The guy’s been on the move for years and years, even before he washed up in the future. It’d be like if Sam came off deployment but instead of going home he ended up in Australia: everyone talks funny, he doesn’t know anyone and all the food tastes just off enough to be wrong.

Sam's not quite sure how to address that yet, given that Steve hasn't even started looking for a place to move yet. He figures he’ll get off his ass once Steve does, but in the meantime he’s kind of enjoying just bumming around his parents’ house, eating Mom’s food and hanging up the Christmas lights that always fall off the side of the porch. He stayed with his parents right after he got discharged, too, but the last time it had been, well, fucking horrible. All he’d do is sit in the basement or backyard and methodically suppress thoughts of setting fire to his mom’s azaleas. Or the neighbors’ playground. Or his own fold-out couch bed. Whatever he happened to be looking at in the moment. When suppression didn’t work he’d drive out in his sister’s car to some patch of woods and engage in psychotherapeutic pyrotechnics.

It’s a lot better now. Sam still can’t really sleep in the basement anymore, but Sierra’s claimed that and anyway the only way Darlene Wilson would make Captain America sleep on a fold-out futon is if they had literally no other furniture and the entire Wilson family was sleeping on the floor. Instead they’ve got the guest room - Sam was initially on the couch, but then they fell asleep watching Die Hard and after spending so long sharing space on their trip it doesn’t really feel weird to sleep in the queen bed together.

Sam knows they should eventually split things up, but that day ain’t here yet. He's enjoying it while it lasts. 

-o-

Steve, in between trying to puppet himself through a convincing facade of normalcy for Sam’s family and ignoring the near-constant buzzing of his official Starkphone, has been trying to come up with a plan. It has not been going fast. The Wilsons all got him presents, which, thank fucking god he did those sketches so he wasn’t just left sitting there like a miserous toad, and at some point between his little talks with Congress and arriving smack dab in the Wilson holiday pageant somebody leaked his phone number. That means every reporter, groupie, well-meaning grandma and wingnut wacko have been taking turns dialing in like they’re on a schedule.

The Starkphone has been slowly starving of battery on the Wilson kitchen counter ever since. Steve should probably get a new “personal” number at some point, but he’s not interested in being contacted outside of an emergency and if it’s an emergency then it’ll damn well come to him. It always does. He transferred the only three important numbers over to the pink phone and hasn’t looked back.

The pink phone remains fully charged at all times. Steve bought a double-layered waterproof case for it and two extra power packs at the airport.

He did spend some time seriously considering attaching the phone case to some kind of chain-and-bracelet arrangement like the Secret Service does for the nuclear football briefcases, but in the end he figures that’d be as good as painting a target on it. He’s got to treat it like a normal phone.

While also guarding it like it’s the key to the Lost Ark, of course. If he somehow loses it, if it gets stolen, if he fucking drops it down a sewer grating - well, if it drops down a sewer grating he’ll damn well get it back out, but if it’s otherwise physically compromised it’ll be a risk. And while he’ll be able to set up a new connection based on what Bucky showed him, this is still Bucky’s phone. Steve’s not giving it up unless he’s several miles past the last resort and accelerating. He needs to be smart about it.

He should print out the screenshots of Bucky’s texts and stash them somewhere safe then extra thoroughly delete any digital files.

No, he can’t. He’s self-aware and socially current enough to recognize that that’s creepy. Keeping the letters someone sends you is normal, appropriate, fine; keeping the texts in a similarly hard copy form is not. Texting is not like letters. He knows that.

Besides, so far they’ve really only had such scintillating exchanges like _you ok? yes. Need anything? no_. and _landed? Yes, staying with sam’s family in virginia_. And Bucky’s photos, of course.

Bucky has been staunchly upholding his end of the daily contact bargain, sending the groupchat pictures of, probably, whatever he’s looking at at the moment. So far it’s been pictures of his boots - proof of life - and the occasional snapshot of sky. Making sure there’s absolutely nothing to draw context clues from and deduce anything at all about his position, Steve thinks, with something a little too angry to be wryness. Still. It’s Bucky talking to him. And yesterday he got to text Bucky _your shoelace is untied._

Steve wishes they _could_ send letters, because there’s all kinds of things you can stick in an envelope. He’s started sketching Bucky a new card deck, and it’s meant to be his welcome home present only Steve’s pretty sure if they were sending letters he’d be mailing it all card by card to Bucky as soon as each one was done. The only reason he hasn’t bought paint yet is because there’s no way to set up his full studio sprawl in the Wilsons’ house and not seriously inconvenience somebody.

This way is better, probably. It’s certainly faster. And novel, at least: they’ve never talked to each other in this way before, in little bitesized chunks of electronic data, the connection practically in real time. It’s not like seeing Buck’s handwriting but he can see Bucky in there all the same - he’s either lost the ability to spell, for one, or - it’s his metal hand, Steve realizes suddenly, feeling deeply stupid. Its ability to interact with a touchscreen must be either erratic or nonexistent, so either way Buck doesn’t text with full use of both hands. No wonder he doesn’t seem up for very long conversations.

Steve’s probably overthinking it, but he can’t afford to fuck this up. He’s got to make Bucky want to send more than a sky picture. He’s not quite sure how yet - he doesn’t want to be harping on about the Good Old Days, and he’s still not sure what exactly Bucky meant by _I’m going to be Bucky Barnes_ and he’s not sure Buck knows either. Steve doesn’t want to be... creating a blueprint that Buck might feel the need to follow. Sam and Natasha were right about him having identity issues; they’re probably right about how to address them.

 _Give him space_ doesn’t mean _leave him alone,_ though.

Steve sends photos right back. His location isn't constrained by opsec and he isn’t limiting himself to one a day, so Buck gets a photo essay on Barf, the welcome home dinner Mrs. Wilson cooks Sam, the wealth of Cap things they inundated him with and an extended tour of every holiday decoration put up in Sam’s neighborhood. Bucky doesn’t exactly comment on any of them, but it’s barely been two weeks and he’s probably busy being on the move.

Steve can’t ask about that, can’t demand details and coordinates and contingency plans, can’t get on a plane or steal a jet and just start kicking the doors of the world in until he finds Bucky behind one of them. This is the only way he has right now to make things easy for Bucky. He wants it to be easy for Buck to talk.

And it’s fucking working, because two days after Christmas Steve wakes up to a very soft ding from the phone under his chin. It’s 3:23 AM, though that’s almost certainly not the time wherever Bucky is. Sam's on the couch tonight, fallen asleep playing that cartoon racing game with Sierra; Steve doesn't have to worry about waking him up. He swipes open the notification.

 **Marlene:** talk

Steve pauses, his brain coming online in something a little softer but no less complete than a combat wakeup. He assesses the situation, eyes scanning the single word over and over, then starts typing.

 **Ginger:** Did i ever tell you about the time i got picked up by the coast guard because i tried to swim the hudson

 **Marlene** : no

 **Marlene:** why the fcuk were uyo doign that

 **Ginger:** well

 **Ginger** : In my defense it was 0500

 **Ginger:** I had a lot of energy to burn

 **Ginger:** It seemed like a good idea

 **Marlene:** why the river.

 **Ginger:** I don’t like water sometimes

 **Marlene:** so you junped nto thw ribver. Of courbse you did

 **Ginger:** I wanted to see if i could do it

 **Ginger:** And i could!

 **Ginger:** Coast guard stopped me halfway across but i definitely could have kept going

 **Ginger:** The captain was really nice about it

 **Ginger:** you alright?

 **Marlene:** fine

 **Marlene:** sonetimes i ne d distratcion s

 **Marlene:** usuully books

 **Marlene:** i read everyhtihng i have with me though

 **Ginger:** you need more?

 **Ginger:** i have a kindle account. You can use it if you’d like

 **Ginger:** you know what kindle is?

**Marlene is typing…**

**Marlene:** book app

 **Ginger:** yep. You can download it for free and use my login

**Marlene is typing…**

**Marlene is typing…**

**Marlene is typing…**

**Marlene:** its throuhg amazon. Keeps trakc of devices adn registers them

 **Ginger:** download it on a burner phone?

 **Ginger:** and how about i make a completely new account, load it with a gift card and send you the login

 **Ginger:** so it’s not affiliated with me or anyone

 **Ginger:** and you can download the app on a burner

 **Ginger:** would that work?

 **Marlene:** yes

 **Ginger:** and i can do the same thing, if you think it’s alright

 **Ginger:** that way it’ll be like we’re reading the same book together

**Marlene is typing…**

**Marlene is typing…**

**Marlene:** i dont read very good boooks

 **Ginger:** what do you mean

 **Marlene:** you saw them

 **Marlene:** [IMG_6231]

Steve blinks down at the photo that comes through. The book - it’s got to be a book - shows an oversaturated painting of a lady - deeply endowed in the chest, thigh and hair department - in the middle of collapsing against a man in a severely compromised jester costume. The title says _FULL MOON MAFIA: Cirque Infierno_ . Below it, over one of the jester's bulging thighs, a smaller blurb says _The right hand of the ringmaster meets the daughter of the don… what will win? Family, duty or THE PACK?_

It’s also not one of the books Bucky had with him when they parted, so either he’s somewhere with an English bookstore or he’s started finding them growing under rocks. Given that Buck somehow found a _spaceship_ just lying in some cave, Steve can’t entirely rule it out.

 **Ginger:** looks pretty exciting to me

 **Marlene:** the writiing is very bad.

 **Ginger:** but you like them

 **Marlene:** theyre effecttive.

 **Ginger:** i mean, with authors like ann l. probe

 **Ginger:** how can you expect anything but quality

 **Marlene:** yuo dont hav to read it

 **Ginger:** well i can’t read that one, it’s not digital

 **Marlene:** whhat do you read

Steve pauses, propping himself up on his elbows in the guest bed. _Not much of anything lately,_ he finally types. _Before that it was usually global intel dossiers. Before that, history books. I had a lot to catch up on_

**Marlene is typing…**

**Marlene is typing…**

**Marlene:** well

 **Marlene:** my boooks atleast will be funnier

Steve snorts hard and drops his face into the pillow, knowing that any more noise will wake the dog and send it clicking around through the house. Before he can think too hard about it he flicks the phone’s camera on and towards him, taking a selfie that’s ghostly from flash, eighty percent pillow and twenty percent bedhead and eyebrows. God, he needs a haircut. His eyes are all scrunched up, at least, and it’s obvious that it’s from laughter.

Steve sends it. _Marlene is typing_ pops up _immediately_ and doesn’t go away for a rewardingly long while. Steve’s drifting off again, one eye open and the rest of his face mashed in the pillow, when Bucky finally replies with _go bakc to sleep._

Steve grins, sends off a single heart emoji and rolls further into the pillow, making himself shut the phone off and leave anything Bucky comes back with for morning. He can take his time, be patient, give Bucky space. Rome wasn’t rebuilt in a day. All he needs is a foothold, an inch, and Buck just let him have one. Buck will let him take the whole mile.

So long as Steve gets it right. He knows he's distant at breakfast the next morning, but he's got to think. He has yet to nail down a complete strategy, what with both of them still relearning their tactics and the field itself being so new. He’s got a lot to think about. All the times he thought _I wish I could show Bucky_ \- well, now he can. The price of milk. The _kinds_ of milk. The way cars look these days - a lot of big motorcycles haven’t changed much, but cars sure have. Though Bucky’s seen cars, obviously. And probably milk too.

He should probably find something better to show Bucky than the cost of groceries.

Steve realizes he’s been standing at the sink with his coffee and staring out the window into the patch of woods behind Sam’s parents’ back yard for longer than is maybe warranted. Then he squints.

Either one of those trees has one hell of a wooden tumor, or there’s a person sitting up there trying _very_ hard not to look like it.

Steve’s spine straightens, slowly, one vertebrae at a time. “Sam?”

“Yeah?” Sam wanders over from where he’s been slathering peanut butter on toast. “Wassup?”

Steve gestures with his chin out the window, keeping the motion small, moving back so Sam can get the full view. “That big tree on the left.”

Sam scans the area for a second. Then his eyes widen. He slowly sets down his toast. “Sierra,” he says, very level. “Where’s Mom.”

“Groceries,” Sierra says from the hall, appearing in the doorway a second later, frowning. “Why?”

“Where’s Dad?” Sam asks, still in his sitrep voice.

“Son?” Mr. Wilson pokes his head in from the office, spectacles hanging off his nose. He and Sierra are both looking at Sam with concern; they’ve picked up something’s wrong. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Sam says, moving away from the window, making eye contact with them one at a time and briefly pressing one finger to his lips in the universal gesture for shhh. “I was just thinking me and Steve could cook some steak tonight, wanted to know if Mom left already. It’s fine, I’ll just call her.”

He walks over to the kitchen table, picks up a piece of mail from the basket and writes _ACT NORMAL, UNDER SURVEILLANCE_ on it, then hands it to Sierra. “I’d say Steve’s got a recipe we should try but all his recipes are from the Great Depression.”

“Hey,” Steve says, his pink phone out and opening a message to Hill. _Do you have an agent stationed near the Wilson house right now?_ “I’m not that bad.”

Sierra’s eyes flick over the envelope, then to Sam. “You can’t cook either,” she says slowly, but she steps over to hand the envelope to her father.

“I couldn’t cook,” Sam says. “Your situational assessment is outdated.”

Steve’s phone vibrates. _No,_ Hill says. _Stark satellite surveillance only. Problem?_

 _Anyone else have agents here?_ Steve types, then catches Sam’s eye. _Sweep, top to bottom,_ Steve gestures, using his face and eyebrows to say _you start up I start down?_ Sam nods and waves for his family to stay in the kitchen.

They clear the house, then start over again. Steve hears Sam calling his mother as they go through, checking under sills and in the unenclosed light fixtures. When Sierra catches them in the kitchen again with an uncompromising expression and a paper that says _WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON_ in pink highlighter, they show her and Mr. Wilson how to look for planted surveillance bugs.

They don’t find any around the house, so they gather in the kitchen to take apart the usual suspects and look for embedded microphones. Sam clicks on the TV and flips to something with a regular laugh track, covering their voices with background noise like Natasha taught them. “Is this necessary?” Mr. Wilson murmurs as he unscrews the casing on their kitchen telephone. Sierra’s dubiously putting a ziploc full of their cell phones in the freezer.

“We don’t know how many HYDRA agents are still out there somewhere ready to take a potshot,” Sam says quietly. “Better safe than sorry.”

“It might not be HYDRA,” Sierra mutters, but she’d surrendered her phone willingly enough even if she did pointedly mention she’d only got it upon landing in the States a week ago. “I’m not saying it can’t be, I’m just saying a lot of people have reasons to have eyes on us. You did steal military property,” she says to Sam. “And he’s Captain America.”

“I’m asking around,” Steve says, pulling the pink phone out to check. “If it’s our guys or not.”  

“Shouldn’t that be in the freezer too?” Sierra says, eyeing the phone.

“If this phone is compromised we have much bigger problems,” Steve says absently. Hill has replied with _standby_ , and then, _no confirmation but that just means my nsa and fbi guys are ignoring my calls. I’ll ask stark to dig back end data but it won’t be fast_

And then, _need backup?_

Steve shows the screen to Sam. Sam slowly rubs his hand over his mouth, reading, beard scraping faintly against his palm.

“What would that look like,” Sam says finally.

Steve types it out. Hill replies immediately. _Iron Man can be on site in 45 min._

Steve and Sam look at each other. He’s pretty sure they’re both thinking the same thing. They’ve only seen the one guy so far, but it’s more than possible he’s just the advance scout for however many teams they can cram into the neighborhood. They’re surrounded by civilians on all sides, and Sam’s family is the first priority. Iron Man is not a stealth unit, but they have no idea if that would be overkill. They’ll need overkill if whoever’s out there came armed for Captain America. They need to find out what they’re dealing with.

“What about the satellite imagery,” Sam says slowly, rubbing his chin. “Would that even… it’s the holidays, lots of people have family visiting and are moving in ways they don’t usually do.” His mouth slants even as he sets his jaw. “Unusual numbers of cars, high likelihood of all of us being in one place, hard to pick out suspicious activity.”

Perfect time for an ambush, he doesn’t have to say. Steve wishes like hell they had Natasha and Bucky here. Steve’s run ops with only two people, sure, but never protecting civilians and civilians who also happen to be his partner’s family at that.

“So they’re not our guys,” Sierra says, watching them, jerking her chin at Steve’s phone. “Are they.”

Steve and Sam exchange glances. “Can’t confirm,” Steve says. “We have to play it safe.”

“Even if they are legitimate,” Mr. Wilson says slowly. “FBI, or… police. Our being under surveillance and not being told about it is unlikely to mean anything… positive.”

“Yeah,” Sierra says flatly. “You ever heard of COINTELPRO, Steve? About what happened to the Black Panther movement?”

“Sierra,” Mr. Wilson says quellingly.

“I… probably don’t know enough,” Steve says, making a note of the names. They sound important. It’s not the first time he’s thought about just how much of his information had been filtered through SHIELD, of how fucking stupid and gullible and careless he’d been. How fucking long it took him to see there was something wrong in SHIELD, let alone that it was fucking _Nazis._ “But I know someone’s not on your side just because they’re wearing the same uniform as you.”

“We have to check this out, Dad,” Sam says. “We can’t afford not to.”

“You shouldn’t have any kind of unknown surveillance on you,” Steve adds. “If it’s the FBI, or police, then they need to be told this isn’t safe for them to do.”

“And if it’s not them,” Sam says grimly, “we need to handle this stat.”

-o-

Once Mrs. Wilson comes home - safe and sound and setting her jaw at the instructions to carry on as normal, having been given the recent events rundown - Steve and Sam convene in the basement to strategize. They’ve got three handguns and the shield between them, along with Sam’s wings and the built-in submachine guns there. The only thing they have that could remotely qualify as body armor is a couple of parkas, none of which fit Steve.

“Going commando,” Sam jokes grimly.

“Just don’t get hit,” Steve tells him, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’d think they teach you that in pararescue.”

“Yeah, right before the water-to-wine course and right after walking on water,” Sam says. “You better be quick with that dinner plate. If I get shot Mom is gonna take turns cutting us like kebab meat.”

They evaluate the terrain, peeking out the corner of one of the basement’s windows that face the woods. Winter means the branches are all bare and there’s little cover on the ground, which means they’ll have to disguise themselves to get close enough to pay a personal visit. “Could you come in from above with your wings?” Steve asks.

“Probably, but it’d attract attention from everybody around,” Sam says. “The noise would travel, too, ‘cause of the height I’d need for a vertical drop.”

“So we come in from the ground.”

“Yep.” Sam sucks his lower lip into his mouth, eyes narrowed at the distant figure. “We’ll go in after dark.”

-o-

“Go out to dinner,” Sam tells his parents and sister. “Go to DC. See a movie. If we don’t call and give you the all clear by eleven, you don’t go home, understand? Go to Union Station and call Natasha and then Stark. Here.” He hands his mother a sticky note with phone numbers on it. “They’ll make sure you’re covered until we can get back to you.”

“Son,” Mr. Wilson says, his face heavy.

“We’ll be fine, Dad. We’ve dealt with a lot worse.”

“We’ll have backup,” Steve adds, because there’s no way Sam’s parents won’t worry but they can at least be reassured that Sam’s not unprepared or alone. “We’ve let people know what’s going on. We’re not going in blind.”

“Let’s go, Paul,” Mrs. Wilson says, taking her husband’s elbow. Her face is set. “You’re taking us to dinner. Somewhere fancy. Sierra, dress nice, baby.”

She pauses in ushering them up and adds, “But wear shoes you can run in.”

-o-

Sam goes to see his family out, all of them getting in the car in the garage to hide the fact that Steve and Sam aren’t going with them. Steve gives Barf a bone and shuts him in his crate, moving quietly just in case their surveillers have a good directional microphone. There’s no sign of movement; when Steve looks out the back window, the shape in the tree is still there.

Sam comes back with their available gear. They suit up, Sam layering for maneuverability without a parka and Steve not bothering beyond a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of gloves. They don’t have comms but cell phones should be sufficient if they do split up - Sam’s got Sierra’s phone on him, the one they’d all agreed was the least likely to have been compromised, unless the AT&T guy at the airport was a plant. And if Sam’s phone was tracked, it would show him with the rest of his family, eating a nice dinner somewhere out in DC.

“I’m putting Hill on standby,” Steve tells Sam as they prepare to exit via Sierra’s bedroom window. “Stark flies fast. He’ll cover them if this turns out to be bigger than we can handle.”

“You should probably tell JB too,” Sam says.

Steve… considers it. He doesn’t want to distract Bucky, not when he’s dealing with his own, far more precarious situation, but if something does go wrong it’ll have been the stupidest oversight in the world to not let Bucky know.

 _Developing situation at Wilsons’,_ he finally types out. _Will update when we know more. Found some surveillance, going to check it out._

There’s no immediate answer, which probably means Bucky is asleep. Steve puts it out of his mind, silencing the phone and slipping out the window after Sam.

They take a roundabout way into the woods, crossing through backyards and into the next neighborhood over to approach the target from behind. Steve breathes deep, letting his senses expand. It’s strange to be stepping into the woods like this, especially since it’s not woods at all, just a part of the local park that extends between housing developments. He can hear cars in the distance, and the television someone has on in one of the houses on Sam’s street behind them. Christmas lights twinkle on the rear porches and decks. It’s about as different from the European forests of the front as it’s possible to be while still featuring dirt and trees, but it doesn’t feel any less like hostile territory.

Steve spares a thought to how it’s probably some kind of operatic irony that good old American soil feels to him like occupied warzone and rolls his eyes at himself. It’s a forest. When Steve gets homesick, it’s generally for shitty paving, yelling neighbors and the lung-shriveling stink of burning coal. And it is like the front. There’s at least one potential enemy agent in the woods ahead of them, and the stakes might as well be the same. Sam’s family is as high-value a target as it gets.

They slip through the trees. It’s a clear night, the stars visible as clean pinpricks through the bony canopy of the trees. They start by sweeping the perimeter, dipping in and out of the patch of woodland to check the nearby neighborhoods; Steve follows Sam and his knowledge of the neighborhood he grew up in, checking if there’s a team placed in the woods or a van full of agents parked in the nearest cul-de-sac next to the garish grins of plastic snowmen. It’s slow going, but eventually they decide that their treebound watcher is the only hostile on site. Unless the jerky animatronic reindeer break free and reveal themselves to be HYDRA agents the area is clear.

They crouch down behind a tree trunk. “Okay,” Sam whispers. “How we doing this.”

“Let’s knock the bird out of the tree,” Steve says. “And see what comes running.”

-o-

Among the skills bestowed unto him by the forests of Europe - besides the knowledge that almost anything is technically edible and the surprisingly involved technique to make coffee out of acorns - is the ability to climb more or less any tree. Steve takes the shield off his back and hands it to Sam, then walks his hands up the trunk. It’s big, sturdy; it should take his weight. Jumping up for a hold would make too much noise, so Steve’s about to koala-hug his way up the first few meters when Sam taps his shoulder and presents him with both hands cupped in a step-up. Steve gratefully steps up.

The climb is slow going, but Steve can appreciate a challenge. There aren’t any branches for the first twenty feet or so, so Steve ends up doing some koala-ing after all, moving glacially slow to keep the scrape of his boots on bark down to a minimum. He creeps up the tree, placing each hand and foot as quietly as he can, easing his way between every twig and branch that seems supernaturally determined to jab into his eyeballs.

Eventually he makes it to the height of the agent’s nest, and then, higher. It takes a few minutes to gather himself up on the branch, drawing his legs up under himself in a crouch.

An owl hoots overhead. Steve braces, judges the distance, and throws himself down into the agent’s tree.  

Hitting just above the guy makes the tree shudder wildly and the agent shout in shock. Steve swings around the trunk, grabs the guy around the neck and clamps a hand over his mouth. For a second Steve’s other hand spasms for a knife that isn’t there - if this was Bieniec or Sourbrodt or Nordrach he’d slit the agent’s throat and it’d be over, but it’s Virginia, they’re not a mile from Sam’s parents’ house, and they need this man alive. Steve gives the struggling body a sharp yank to make sure he hasn’t tied himself to the tree or anything, then changes his grip and flips them backward off the trunk.

They only do one rotation before Steve hits the ground in a half-crouch, but the agent goes limp enough in his arms that for a second Steve wonders incredulously if the guy fainted. Steve doesn’t ease his hold, flipping the agent over and putting him facedown on the ground, twisting his arms back so Sam can slide in from the dark and ziptie everything in reach.

Steve checks the guy for an earpiece, and finds one. He also finds a holstered sidearm, a directional mike and an ID folio for - Steve angles it to catch some moonlight - one Michael Edgemond, agent of the FBI.

It’s at this point the guy comes up from his swoon and starts struggling, so Steve hands the gun, earpiece and folio to Sam and hoists the guy to his knees.

 _“What the fuck,”_ he half-shouts, struggling enough that Steve has to shove him back so he doesn’t overbalance. “What the _fuck_ are you doing? Who are you?”

“I’m Dasher, that’s Vixen,” Sam says from behind him. “But you sure as shit ain’t Santa Claus. Wanna tell us what you’re doing up that tree?”

“You threw - you -” The guy twists around, gaping up at the trees for a second and looking back at Steve with incredulous fury. _“You threw me out of a tree!”_

“Threw?” Steve says, unimpressed with the guy’s situational assessment of the last five minutes.

“This is _assault_ ,” the guy says, an edge of shakiness starting to bleed into his tone. “You’re assaulting a federal officer.”

“Really?” Sam says interestedly, passing Steve back his shield. “How so?”

“I’m a FBI agent!”

“Sure you are,” Steve says agreeably, holstering the shield on his back. “Who’s on the other end of the comms?”

“My _partner,_ who is _also_ an FBI agent, which makes assaulting us a _federal crime.”_

“Uh huh. That’s a pretty sad excuse for being some creep we caught stalking people,” Sam says, heavy with skepticism.

The agent twists to try and see him, then goes guppy-faced with fury. “You’re _holding my badge!”_

“So? You think there weren’t HYDRA operatives in the FBI?” Sam says calmly, the hardness of his face the only indicator that they’re all not just having a teasing holiday chat in the woods. “All the Nazis had nice official SHIELD badges and CIA badges and whatever other badges they liked. They were _real officers._ You think we’re gonna believe you just because you pinky promise you’re not a bad guy?”

“What?” The guy’s looking wild around the edges, trying to shuffle around on his knees to face Sam more. “You think I’m _HYDRA_?”

“What we know is that you’re armed and spying on us,” Sam says, just as they all hear something big moving towards them through the trees.

Steve grabs the shield off his back and turns towards the sounds as Sam melts back into the dark, pistol at the ready. It sounds like only one person, blundering through the woods, but the sound might be a cover for more, stealthier movements around them.

“Don’t shoot!” someone calls breathlessly, a man, in the kind of voice that’s trying to carry but also not be heard out of sheet embarrassment. “I’m Agent Orell - I’m his partner - we can explain!”

Looks like the comm had been the open line kind. Steve grimaces and listens hard for others approaching; it’d be just like HYDRA to send in one guy as a sacrificial lamb to distract from the rest of the team taking up positions around them. The advancing agent has both hands up and he’s moving not quite towards them in the dark. This guy’s in a lighter coat and hat, not bundled up to the eyebrows like the first agent; he was probably sitting in a car not too far away, for him to get here so quickly.

Or in a house, or in a van, full of a dozen other agents watching and listening. At SHIELD Steve would only get involved at the very end of surveillance ops, the last hours where stakeout became ambush and his job was to lead the raid, but he knows how it’s run on high value targets.

“Stop,” Steve orders when the guy gets close enough to visibly recognize the kneeling shape of the first agent.

The agent stops. “Kneel,” Steve orders, keeping close to a big-trunked tree just in case he needs to use it as body armor. “Next to your partner. Face the same way. Hands on your head.”

The second agent obeys, and as he drops to the ground Sam slides out of the trees again and efficiently zip-cuffs him, emptying his pockets and taking his phone, wallet, keys and service sidearm. “Let’s hear that explanation,” Sam says, once he’s stepped out of reach at their backs and unholstered his own pistol again.

“We were assigned to your detail,” the new guy says immediately, turning his head slightly like he wants to crane and look at Sam before thinking better of it. Steve circles around to face them, stepping in close enough to loom but still stay out of grabbing range. Both agents’ eyes flick to his gun, his face, then the gun again. “I’m Trent Orell and that’s Michael Edgemond -”

“Prove it,” Steve says.

“You can call our supervisor,” the new guy says, rallying. “I’ll give you the number. He can explain -”

“Hey, good idea,” Steve says. “No, keep your hands up. I don’t need you to give me a number.” He pulls out the pink phone, keeping his eyes and his pistol trained on them, and dials Natasha’s current line from memory.

She picks up right away, which probably means she’s feeling magnanimous. “Hey,” Steve says. “I need a favor. Can you get me an emergency number for the director of the FBI? His personal one. One he can’t ignore.”

“Are you having _fun_ without me, Rogers?” Natasha says suspiciously.

“Only because you’re not here,” Steve says. “Wish you were. We haven’t thrown anyone off a roof in ages.”

“Ah,” Natasha says. “You found some new friends out there in suburbia?”

“Yep. See, they say they’re FBI, but…”

“Yeah, don’t they always. You called Hill?”

“Yeah, first thing. She had satellite imagery only and that didn’t give us much. Holiday patterns.”

“Fucking Christmas. Alright, yes, I can get a number for you. Standby. And send me photos of their faces and IDs,” Natasha says. “Even if they do end up being real live feds we don’t want them to feel like they can just go around _doing_ things.”

Steve dutifully hauls up agents “Edgemond” and “Orell”, making them flinch one at a time in his phone camera’s flash. Then he does it again, this time asking very politely if they could keep their eyes as open as possible for the camera, please, don’t want to go throwing off the facial recog. Then, with the agents’ night vision shot and having just announced their presence via multiple light flashes, Steve and Sam back up into the trees to see if it brings anybody running.

The two agents look around and start shifting after a couple minutes, one of them saying, “Uhhh,” quietly, but otherwise the woods stay quiet. Steve sends the photos to Natasha, one eye on the trees around them, and gets a number and a winky face in return.

He glances at Sam, who shakes his head. They wait a while longer, crouched in the bony undergrowth; Steve once again wishes for Natasha and Bucky, for people he can trust to do exactly what’s necessary and finish any fight they end up in. It’s an old wish, though, a variation on one he’s been having since he got dug up in 2011 and one that it turned out wasn’t met by just having people on his team. Alpha STRIKE, case in point.

 _Clear?_ Sam gestures at him finally, eyebrows up, and Steve shrugs and nods back. Sam hands him a phone - one of the agents’ phones, Steve realizes, which, good thing Sam thought of _that_ because Steve was two seconds away from dialing the _director of the FBI_ on his goddamn Bucky phone. How’s that for breach of opsec.

Thank god for Sam, Steve thinks, stepping out in front of the two kneeling agents and holding up the phone. “Passcode?”

He doesn’t immediately get an answer. “I won't ask again,” he adds, mild, and tosses his pistol up and spins it so it smacks back into his hand barrel first.

He gets the passcode, the second agent counting off four digits. Steve returns his grip on the gun to firing position instead of the one universally agreed upon for pistol-whipping.

Luckily for everyone, the phone’s pick up two rings after he dials. “Hello, Director,” Steve says preemptively. “This is Steve Rogers.”

There’s a few seconds of silence. “What?”

“I also go by Captain America,” Steve says conversationally. “Sometimes.”

“...Is this a joke?”

“I hope so,” Steve says. “Because I have two men here claiming to be your agents, but since we caught them engaged in covert surveillance on my current residence, I’m not inclined to believe a word out of their mouths. But there’s a chance they _are_ legitimate, so we figured we’d check before deciding how to dispose of them.”

There’s a short, distinctly appalled silence on the other end of the line. _“Dispose?”_

“We can’t just leave them here,” Steve says reasonably. “They’d die of exposure.”

“Where -” The director cuts off, sounding fairly angry about it. “What the _hell_ is going on here?”

“It’s pretty simple,” Steve says. “Either you approved surveillance on me, or you didn’t. If you did, well, I’m not thrilled, but I understand. But if you didn’t…”

“Assuming _any_ of this is true,” the director says in a controlled voice, “you expect me, at ten o’clock at night, to just disclose classified information to some person who calls and _says he’s Captain America?”_

“Hey, we’re being nice. We’re doing this the hard way,” Steve says. “All you have to do is go make some calls and find out who’s on Cap watch tonight. Or are you saying there is no Cap watch? Because if not, we can do things the easy way after all.”

“I don’t like what you’re implying,” the director says tightly.

“Me neither,” Steve says. “But HYDRA keeps trying to kill me, so I don’t really have the luxury of being nice. You have twenty minutes. I’ll call you back.”

Steve hangs up, then looks at the formerly arboreally situated agent and gestures at him. “Hey, do you get bathroom breaks on tree duty? Do you just piss in a jar up there?”

_“What?”_

“Bathroom breaks,” Steve says patiently. “You’re required by law to have them, you know.”

“That’s only by state,” Sam says from behind them. “It’s not federal law.”

“What, really?” Steve says. “That’s not right. You got a union, son? Don’t tell me you don’t.”

The two of them stare up at him. “There’s… the FBIAA…” the non-tree-bound agent says after a second.

“And what do they do?”

“They’re… the FBI union. Basically.”

“Are you a member?”

“...Yes?”

“Paid your dues?”

“Yes?”

“Good,’ Steve says. Both of them are looking at Steve like he’s speaking Chitauri now, only the tree guy looks extra mad about it. “Bring up bathroom breaks at the next meeting. Bodily functions don’t stop just because you’re on duty.” Sam’s poker face looks like it’s really taking a beating. Steve makes sure to make eye contact over the agents’ heads. “It’s inhumane to force conditions that don’t account for physical needs, no matter what your job is.”

“Can you please,” the tree agent says, through gritted teeth, “please, please, please stop talking.”

Sam shakes his head in disappointment, his voice remarkably steady for how he was biting his cheek a second ago. “This is what happens when you try to help people,” he says sadly. “Ungrateful.”

Steve shrugs. “You can read a horse its rights but you can’t make it drink.” He checks the pink phone; no reply. Bucky’s definitely asleep. “We should check in,” Steve tells Sam anyway.

Sam nods and pulls his own phone out, presumably texting his family that they haven’t been shot to death by Nazis in the woods yet. Steve keeps an eye out while Sam’s attention is occupied, then they switch off so he can update Bucky. _Only two guys so far. No fight, they say they’re FBI. Probably just surveillance. Confirming now._

The other phone in Steve’s hand rings. He swipes without looking. “Not bad,” he says. “Eleven minutes to spare. Names?”

The director doesn’t sound happy, but he at least has the sense not to fuck around. “Special agents Trent Orell and Michael Edgemond.”

“And their badge numbers?” Steve says patiently.

There’s a distinct animosity in the director’s tone as he recites the numbers. Steve really should look up what the man’s name is sometime soon. The numbers match, at least, so at least they won’t be seeing each other in court for charges of manslaughter.

“I’d like to speak to my agents now,” the director says coldly.

“Nope.”

_“Nope?”_

“You can talk to them when you come pick them up,” Steve says. “I’m not interested in playing go-between for you. Besides, their hands are ziptied.”

 _“Ziptied?_ Did you _assault -”_

“We didn’t assault anybody,” Steve says, hard, cutting him off. “We just spent an entire year dealing with everybody and their auntie trying to kill us, and it all started right here in DC. So when we find somebody spying on us, we take steps. If you don’t want me to treat your agents like hostiles, then you warn me beforehand and send me a list and a photo of every man you’re going to have on my detail.”

There’s a long, frosty silence on the other end, which Steve can at least respect better than incredulous sputtering. “For the level of access you’re asking for, Mr. Rogers,” the director finally says in hypothermic tones, “you would have to be a supervising agent of the FBI. We do not hand out classified information to any person on the street who takes it in their head to ask, regardless of their personal situation and individual paranoias. I can refer you to our applications page if you like.”

Steve lets his shrug be obvious in his voice. “Okay, don’t. We can go through this song and dance as many times as you like. I see an agent I don’t recognize, I have no choice but to take steps.”

“There are steps we can take as well.”

“Come and try me,” Steve says, and hangs up again.

Agents Allegedly Edgemond and Orell are staring at him. “You’re crazy,” Allegedly Orell says faintly.

Steve smiles, feeling his face stretch back over his teeth. “What would you do if you found armed strangers spying on your family?”

“Call the police, _like a sane person,_ ” Allegedly Orell stresses, immediate.

“Sure,” Steve says. Sam snorts somewhere behind them. “And if you turned out to be HYDRA with an assault team waiting in the wings that would’ve gotten them all killed. That’s if HYDRA didn’t just hijack the local 911 calls outright.”

“Or put their plants in the local department,” Sam says. “How do we know you haven’t tipped off the cops either? Their boss is probably calling the five-o on us right now, by the way,” he adds to Steve.

“Good point,” Steve says, taking out the second agents’ phone, winding up and throwing both into the undergrowth. Tree Guy makes a choked-off noise but wisely doesn’t actually say anything, though maybe that's because now he looks too mad to speak.

“Relax,” Sam says, hanging their two holstered sidearms off a tree branch. “Feeb phones for sure got location services enabled. You’ll find them eventually.” He looks at Steve, jerking his head at the two agents. “What do you want to do with them?”

“This is kind of a new experience for me,” Steve admits. “In the war we always just killed them.”

“Yeah, I’m not super feeling that,” Sam says, scratching his chin. “We’d have to bury them and it’s a real bitch to dig anything when the ground’s frozen.”

Steve sighs. “I suppose we should drop them off somewhere they can get picked up. The director’s probably scrambled his own backup too.”

“Yeah, let’s get them back to their little friends,” Sam says decisively. “What do you say? Strip them naked and leave them handcuffed together on the nearest highway median?”

One of the agents makes a muffled choking noise. “Why not,” Steve says, holstering his pistol. “After all, it is Christmas.”

-o-

There’s something in the tree with him.

It’s almost dawn. The birds are awake and have started twittering their heads off. There’s breathing near him, and when he stills himself to listen, a rapid heartbeat.

It’s a dog.

Barnes stares at it. The dog stares back. It’s in a tree. It’s in _his_ tree. He arrived too late to find anywhere open to stay in this godforsaken villagette and so a night in the park it was. It’s right on the coast so it’s warm and dry and the trees are big gnarled bastards sprawling out in twisty shapes, many of them relatively low to the ground. So he can see, more or less, how the presence of the dog is not out of the realm of possibility.

It’s crouched with all four paws underneath it on a big branch, close to the trunk. It’s obviously a stray, with torn ears and a dirty, patchy pelt. It doesn’t look very comfortable.

It occurs to Barnes that the stare might actually be a fairly plaintive look.

He pries himself out of his tree fork, swearing under his breath, and heads for the dog. It doesn’t really move as he approaches it, just crouches down lower to its branch and looks up at him with big yellow eyes. It sort of dodges back when he makes a couple of testing grabs for it, but it doesn’t snap at him and doesn’t try to dive off the branch so he steels himself and hooks it quick under his metal arm.

It struggles, making his gutshot side twinge, its paws scrabbling at his thigh and hip, but it continues to not bite him so he’ll take what he can fucking get. _“How_ did you get up here,” he mutters vengefully as he struggles down one-armed, the dog headbutting him repeatedly in the kidneys. “You weren’t there when I got in.”

They get down to the ground more or less without incident. Barnes bends to set the dog down and gets kicked in the stomach for his trouble, the dog pushing off him to skip tidily away down the beach. It does stop a few dozen yards out to look back at him, but probably only to make sure he’s not chasing after it with an axe. Barnes scowls at it and turns away. May it find much happiness grubbing in the nearest dumpster.

He makes his way back up and resettles in his tree fork. It was actually pretty damn comfortable up here and he has at least thirty more minutes before full dawn.

Ten minutes later he cracks an eye again. There’s a brief scratching, scrabbling noise, as of dog claws on tree bark. Barnes opens his eyes all the way. The dog is back in the fucking tree, even higher this time, inching along a branch no thicker than Barnes’ thigh.

“Who _taught_ you that?” Barnes demands. _“Why?”_

The dog keeps creeping along, thoroughly ignoring him. It’s definitely headed his direction, though. Why. What the fuck does it want.

Maybe it can smell the food in his pack.

Well, it’s not fucking getting any. If it can climb trees it can certainly fend for itself. Hunt, or whatever. Dogs hunt. Especially out here. It’s probably got him confused for some kind of overgrown tree-dwelling deer or whatever and is trying to hunt _him._

The dog settles four feet away, crouched down, and puts its head on its paws. It looks at him with giant yellow eyes.

On the other hand. Barnes is capable of killing anyone in a hundred mile radius in a hundred different ways in under ten seconds, but he’s not sure he could manage more than two minutes of conversation. Skillsets are not evenly distributed. Appearances can be deceiving.

Barnes opens his pack and tosses it the meat from his sandwich. It looks thin.

-o-

It’s around four in the morning. Sam’s family came back safe, and as midnight came and went it became apparent that the FBI didn’t think it was worth it to come break their door down, or that they were at least busy making sure their two surveillance birds hadn't lost any toes. Steve’s staying up anyway, just in case they decide to try anything before morning, and promised to wake Sam up if he so much as hears a rat fart out of place. He paces the house in silence, first indoors and then slipping back outside to do a perimeter check; he ends up in the Wilsons’ backyard, shadowed under their deck, looking out at the little forest.

He couldn’t sleep tonight even if he weren’t on watch. He didn’t get the adrenaline surge of real combat but he knows this alertness is going to last the next eight hours or so, and he might as well use it thinking. He’s not dumb enough to think this little incident will be anywhere near the end of it, and the FBI aren’t the only ones who’ll be hellbent on hounding him now that he’s back in the States. They aren’t going to give up when he moves to Brooklyn, and it’s only going to get worse when Bucky joins him.

It’s not going to matter if Bucky’s civilian cover is bulletproof. The Wilsons are civilians. They’re Steve Rogers’ known associates now too.

Some part of Steve rankles at thinking like this, strategizing like this, about Americans. These are his people. The war is over. Should’ve been over. Peggy could thrive under the spy life but Steve can’t keep hold of the necessary doublethink, can’t run the deception necessary to treat a hostile like a friend for any length of time. He doesn’t work like that. If someone’s an enemy, they’re the enemy. If they’re the enemy, he acts as the enemy deserves. And to a part of him, it _burns_ to turn that gaze upon the men who swore themselves to the protection of the same country he did.

The rest of him, the part that’s been roughed up by cops before he was old enough to drink and tripped up by his fellow soldiers in Basic and most recently had to deal with a coup from the fucking Secretary of State, dials Natasha’s number again.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself. What now? Found another FBI surveillance team in your oatmeal?”

“Not exactly. But I was thinking that since they went out of their way to pay me a visit, I should go out of my way right back. Also, they might try to arrest me tomorrow morning.”

“Ah.”

“So I figured I’d ask an expert. Any ideas on how to make the director real sorry he ever took his post?”

“Going after another federal agency so soon, Rogers?” Natasha says, but she sounds pleased. “And you keep telling me you don’t know how to talk to a pretty girl.”

Steve tilts his head up, finding the distant wash of stars over the faint glow of local light pollution. “Will you help?”

“Of course,” Natasha says. “Let’s have a little fun.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please imagine steve standing ominously under that deck only the deck is covered with santa claus christmas lights  
> [spy thriller silhouette shot pulls out]  
> [you see he's surrounded by plastic reindeer]  
> [across the street a woman in uggs and a bathrobe is walking her bichon frise for late night wee-wee and watching him suspiciously]
> 
> artist interpretation here by the unparalleled nendian
> 
> \- ch title is from BE MY ANIME by Rat Boy, chosen 1000% for the impeccable musical intro aka i need every song from now on to include phone buzz noises and xylophone tingalings


	2. bad things come in twos

The doorbell rings first thing the next morning, before Sam’s parents are even up. Steve, who’s been up all night waiting for more or less exactly this, and Sam, better rested but likewise, both go for the door. Steve picks up his pistol on the way, holding it up to show Sam; Sam wavers, looking at it, then shakes his head and motions for him to stow it. They open the door unarmed.

It’s two men and a woman, all in suits, with the woman’s noticeably better fitted. “Hi,” the woman says, holding up a familiar badge folio. “I’m Janet Harper. I’m the executive assistant director for the national security branch of the FBI.”

Steve feels his eyebrows creep up. “Good to know they’re taking it seriously.”

“Oh, we’re taking it very seriously,” Harper says. “I’m here to find out why you aren’t. Let’s talk.”

“Warrant?” Sam says, leaning against the doorframe.

“We’re not coming in,” Harper says. “We can talk just fine right here. Here’s some news for you: assaulting a federal agent and threatening another with a gun are not just things we can ignore. You want to act like some half-cocked vigilante? Congratulations, everyone in there is now on a no-fly list.” Harper jerks her chin over Sam’s shoulder, into the Wilson house. “They’ve all been marked for assessment to determine whether a preliminary investigation is necessary, and after your little performance they’re going to _be_ necessary. Your actions have consequences. When you break the law it affects more than just you.”

Steve got prepped for more or less exactly this last night, but he still feels something inside him crystallize as Harper talks, going hard-edged and stiff. “Are you sure,” he says, slowly, making eye contact, “that you want to do this.”

Harper stares back at him, just as hard. _“Want_ to do this? Captain, I _want_ two million dollars and a pony. This isn’t about _want._ It’s the law. You don’t get special treatment just because you got away with it at SHIELD.”

“He didn’t ask you to stop surveillance,” Sam says sharply. “He asked to be kept informed as a basic security precaution, for _everyone’s_ sake. It would cost you nothing and get you our cooperation. Instead -”

“Instead of arresting me, like the _law_ says they should,” Steve says, watching Harper, “they’ll just bully a civilian family whose only crime was taking me in for Christmas. You’re already giving me special treatment, Assistant Director Harper. And I’m asking, are you sure you want to do this.”

The two agents behind her are at least trained enough not to fidget, but they look like they want to. “Are you _asking_ to be arrested,” Harper says flatly.

Steve shrugs slightly. “I told your boss to come after me and see what happens. If this is how he wants to find out, let's go.”

Harper stares back at him, not quite wrong-footed, assessing. He can see why they sent her. The two agents last night had been cowed by him, by the Captain America factor or the way he and Sam had done things; Harper doesn’t look like she even knows what being cowed is. And she’s smart enough to hear what he’s not saying: she doesn’t know what it is he’s threatening to pull out of his ass if she takes his bait, and that means the FBI doesn’t know either. She’s aware that there’s a big chance of making the kind of blunder here that career agents don’t recover from, and that right now calling his bluff and arresting him sounds a lot like playing right into his hands.

It’s only half bluff. “There are plenty of people who’d love to see you arrested, but your mic drop in Congress made you a meme. Have you looked online yet? Never mind,” Natasha told him last night. “The point is, you’re now officially a stick-it-to-the-man mascot and internet folk hero. Try not to get handcuffed, but if I don’t hear from you in twenty-four hours I’ll assume you’re in lockup and act accordingly.”

“Should I call Bernie?” Steve asked.

“Eh. Not yet. The director doesn’t seem suicidal. He’s new, though, so I guess we’ll see!”

They will see. Steve will have this fucking fight if he has to. He’s not having Bucky come back to federal harassment and surveillance.

Harper looks a half a second away from making a decision, so Steve decides to make it for her. Natasha did tell him to _try_ and not get arrested. “You came to give us your message. We heard you,” Steve says. “I’m meeting with the director this week to iron things out.” Or at least he will be. If they want to get in his face, he’ll get in theirs. “Hell, you’ll probably be there too. You can make sure nobody’s getting any special treatment when we make sure this doesn't happen again.”

Harper gives him a look that says she’d gladly roast his lungs on a spit but wouldn’t lower herself to eat them. “Then we’ll be seeing you,” she says curtly, turning on her heel and striding back to the big black Escalades they arrived in. The other two agents, trying not to look too relieved about not being required to handcuff Captain America, follow her.

Steve and Sam don’t close the door until the cars turn the corner. Steve scans the street while Sam watches the cars go; it’s early enough that even the neighbor with four tiny mop dogs isn’t loitering between yards with her array of leashes yet. “That went well,” Steve says, as mildly as he can while still mentally picturing Harper painting crosshairs on Sam’s entire goddamn family.

Sam exhales hard, eyes still sharp on the street. “I gotta say I didn’t expect the mafia approach.”

“Natasha said they’d back down if they were smart.”

“And how smart do we think they’re gonna be,” Sam says flatly.

Steve glances up at the sky, grey and promising cold rain if not outright snow, then back at Sam. “I think we shouldn’t wait for whatever they decide they want to do to us.”

“Offense is the best defense,” Sam agrees, his voice not quite back from its trip to the tundra yet.

“Though a little more defense couldn’t hurt,” Steve allows, pulling back into the house and tipping his head up the stairs, to the rest of the Wilsons. “We can't be here all the time. We need to set it up so that they don’t need us to be.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I got some ideas.” Sam scrubs his hand over his face briefly and resurfaces looking a little less ready for arson. “You up for a little trip today? We can get started right off.”

Steve gestures for Sam to lead the way.

-o-

When preparing a battleground - if given the luxury of an opportunity to prepare - the first thing is to evacuate the civilians. While Sam showers, Steve calls Hill.

“Hi,” he says when the line connects. “I’ve pissed off the FBI. I have three people I need to move out of the line of fire.”

“Congratulations,” Hill says. “The Wilsons have just won an all-expenses-paid vacation in  their non-extraditing country of choice. A Starkjet will be available to take them to their destination as soon as they decide they’re ready.”

“I’ve missed you, Maria,” Steve says with genuine feeling. “How long has this plan been on standby?”

“Buy me dinner when you come back to the city. We’ve been prepping ever since Falcon entered the picture,” Hill says. “Widow told me to hold off on the media aspect and only run background prep with Stark PR. Do you have it handled?”

“I will,” Steve says. “It’s next on the list.”

“Don’t put it off,” Hill warns. “Public perception is half the information game here. Also, talk to Rhodes. He was working with the FBI task force that mopped up after INSIGHT and he can probably get you the meetings you need to resolve this. And we need to resolve it, Steve,” she says. “We can’t afford infighting. Bury this quick.”

“They threatened Sam’s family, Maria,” Steve says. “For no reason. I told them if they want to put a detail on me they have to let me know who it is, otherwise I’ll assume they’re hostiles. This morning they sent over the national security assistant director to say fuck you and by the way, we’re going to make the Wilsons’ lives hell because you didn’t cower like a good little civilian. They don’t have the sense to get buried.”

“Hmm,” Hill says. “The assistant director?”

“Janet Harper.”

“Hmm.”

“Sounded like she had something personal against SHIELD, too. It must’ve been that famous interagency cooperation I kept hearing about.”

“SHIELD was the hotbox that fostered an entire goddamn coup, Rogers,” Hill says, bone dry. “Don’t be surprised if there are people out there who won’t invite you to their birthday parties. Especially in federal agencies. Especially in DC.”

“That’s no excuse for this kind of bullshit,” Steve says. “If they want to play it this way then I’ll damn well play, Hill.”

“I know you will. Alright. I’ll see about getting you some face time with the director if you promise to not make any moves until we can have a meeting. I won’t ask you to put your diplomat hat on because I know you don’t have one -”

“Hey!”

“- but this is going to get resolved a lot faster if you play nice. Understood?”

“Understood,” Steve grumbles. He can play _nice._ He’ll be a perfect fucking gentleman. He’ll be the nicest brick that's ever been thrown through the FBI’s window.

-o-

Sam gets started on breakfast while the rest of the Wilsons get up. Sam gave them an abridged account of the saga of Dasher and Vixen and the tree-dwelling federals last night - Steve heard them murmuring together as he took care of Barf - but they need to talk about what happens next. Especially considering the little visit they got this morning.

Sierra, first downstairs, doesn’t wait for them to broach the subject. She enters the kitchen, goes straight for the coffee, chugs from an egregiously large cup - twenty seconds straight, the coffee steaming hot, too - and then says, in monotone, “What now.”

“We’re changing your name and shipping you to a new life in Mongolia,” Sam tells her soberly.

“Finally, vacation,” Sierra says with no expression, sitting down at the kitchen table. “I heard the doorbell ring. Gonna go ahead and bet it wasn’t girl scouts.”

Sam gestures with his own coffee cup like _yeah, no shit_. “Waiting for Mom and Dad to come down.”

Sam’s parents don’t waste any time either, in no hurry to get their coffee but sitting down and looking expectantly at Sam when they get their cups. Steve’s reminded a little of how his own mother used to wait for whatever excuse he’d have this time for failing arithmetic; it was the only subject he couldn’t get away with bad marks, because Ma knew damn well that Bucky perched over his shoulder with his homework every night like some kind of mathematically obsessed gargoyle. Mrs. Wilson has a similar look on her face: _I’m probably not going to like what I’m about to hear, but I’m tired and parts of this situation have circled back around to very funny._

“The FBI isn’t happy with us,” Sam says, frank, sitting down across from his parents with Steve and Sierra catty-corner. “Right now we’re setting it up so if things get bad, you three aren’t caught up in the mess.”

"What kind of mess are we talking here," Sierra says. 

Steve braces his forearms on the table, folding them. "No-fly lists. Probably other watchlists. Potentially putting you under investigation." 

“We’re not running,” Mrs. Wilson says. She folds her hands over her husband’s, both of them calm. “They can put us on all the no-fly lists as they want. We haven’t done anything wrong and we aren't going to act like we did.”

“I know,” Sam says, sounding more tired than Steve has ever heard him. “But it might come down to physical safety, and - Mom, Dad, when I was in college, one of my buddies got pranked by his frat. A bunch of guys got cop uniforms and knocked on his door and ‘arrested’ him. He thought it was real, his girlfriend thought it was real, and that was just some college kids. To anyone actually, seriously coming after me, or Steve, it’s going to be the _easiest thing in the world_ to grab some uniforms, knock on your door and say ‘come with us’. We can’t assume anybody’s gonna play by the rules. We have to be prepared.”

“It would be a temporary international trip,” Steve says. “You’d have your pick of non-extraditing countries, all expenses taken care of while Sam and I sort this out. It won’t be a commercial flight, so the no-fly list won’t be a problem.”

Mr. Wilson is frowning slightly; Mrs. Wilson still has that look of private irony on her face. She quirks an eyebrow at Steve. “So we just get all Roman Polanski and go? Get on a private plane, no charge, just like that?”

“This is on me,” Steve says, gesturing slightly to indicate the whole situation. “I’m owed a few favors. Or I’ll owe them. It’s not on you to clean up my mess. And this could get very messy.”

“If me and Steve can’t get the FBI to chill out, we’re gonna be at a serious disadvantage,” Sam says. “We’re very lucky to have experts on speed dial, but their expert recommendation is to get out of the hot zone. Any enemy will be using you as leverage, against me _and_ Steve, and we need to make sure that if push comes to shove you aren’t in danger. So if it gets bad - Mom. Dad. You too, Sierra. Take the trip.”

There’s a few moments of silence as they all look at each other, absorbing. Sierra breaks it by sighing and knocking back the dregs of her second cup of coffee. “Always wanted the chance to fleece some Stark money,” she says, her usual deadpan tone taking on a philosophical edge. “Guess this works as good as any. Since I’m assuming that’s what’s bankrolling this little contingency.”

“It’s either that or recovered Nazi funds,” Steve assures her. If he thinks about Stark’s money as anything other than a battlefield resource it gets kind of strange, but right now it’s just another tool to make sure Sam’s family doesn’t catch the shit stirred up by his choices.

“Even better,” Sierra says, raising her empty mug in a toast. “We’ll see the Maldives on Nazi dollar, cool, yay.”

Mrs. Wilson is watching Sam, who’s looking back at her. “You got this?” she asks - not like she doubts him, but like a general asking for a troop assessment.

“Yeah,” Sam says, the same way. “We got this.”

Mrs. Wilson makes a slight face of _well, if that’s the way it is._ “Then I guess we could all use a vacation. If it comes down to it.”

“It might not,” Sam says, cracking a grin. “It’s even odds still that Steve’ll end up making the director cry and apologize.”

-o-

Mom and Dad seem to take the whole almost-possibly-murdered-by-HYDRA-strike-teams-hiding-in-the-woods episode and subsequent potential evac plan pretty well, which Sam guesses is actually not that surprising given they’ve had a whole year to deal with him being off terrorist hunting and their mere existence being a potential point of exploitation. Sierra, however, corners him by the coat closet when Sam’s sitting on the stairs, tying the laces on Dad’s borrowed snow boots. “Are you and Steve fucking?” she asks frankly.

Sam swivels to give her the full eyebrows. “No?”

“Bullshit,” Sierra says, because she is a distrusting ass bitch.

“Steve’s kinda married,” Sam says, because there’s no reason to keep that from Sierra and in any case it’s not like he’s dropping Bucky Barnes’ entire file and life story in her lap. “And let’s just say wifey is _wild.”_

Sierra’s eyebrows winch down into full I-Will-Not-Simply-Solve-For-X-I-Will-Obliterate-It. “The _Black Widow?”_ she says disbelievingly.

Sam has to curl down and put his head between his knees to laugh that one out for a minute. “Natasha would use Steve like a gym sock,” he manages, in between wheezing for air. And their date nights would leave craters seen from the moon, Jesus Christ. “No, it’s not her. Hoo. Jesus. They’re tight but no. It’s not her.”

Sierra doesn’t seem amused, but then, she hasn’t met Natasha. “Are you saying it’s _Margaret Carter?”_

“Uh - no. Not her,” Sam says, even though he’s still not clear on the details of how exactly that boogie went down back in nineteen forty whatever. He should probably ask Steve about that at some point. “Not Carter either.”

Sierra’s face is rich with disapproval. “Whoever it is, she’d better know what the fuck is going on here, because he looks at you like you spangled his stars and I saw you do your little Totally Spies mind meld together. And you better have a talk with him too, especially if he doesn’t know yet about big future words like _queer.”_

Sam’s face tries to do like six things at once and kinda feels like he sprains something in his sinuses. “Oh, he knows what queer is,” he manages, only a little strangled. “He is fully one hundred percent up to date in that respect.”

Sierra’s eyes narrow further. “You really aren’t convincing me you two aren’t fucking.”

Sam rolls his eyes at her. “Fine, it’s dicks out every night. We screw on the flag on alternate Tuesdays. He does a bald eagle screech when he c-”

“Sam.”

“What do you want, Sierra? If that’s how he looks at me then that’s how he looks at me. He knows what queer is, queer was around before he was -”

“You brought him to Christmas.”

“Yeah, because even if he _wasn’t_ my friend I’m not gonna tell him to take a hike on Christmas. He’s doesn’t have an apartment, he _is_ my friend, _it’s Christmas._ We don’t have to be fucking to care about each other, alright? Why do _you_ even care anyway?”

“You _brought him to Christmas._ And it’s my job as big sister to make sure you don’t put your own foot up your ass so far you fuck the rest of us with it. If it comes out you _are_ together - Sam, we’re gonna get _firebombed.”_

Sam pauses, then finishes tying his shoelaces. “I know that,” he says quietly. “But we might as well just crawl away and die right now if we live scared of what some Hitler-worshipping cross-burning freak might do.”

“I’m not saying _dump him,”_ Sierra says, half exasperated, half relieved she’s getting through. “I’m saying make sure he’s worth it. And build Mom and Dad a fireproof house, ‘cause it’s a miracle we don’t have the neighbors digging through the trash looking for Captain America toenail clippings to sell on Ebay.”

Sam cracks a grin. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists. And I were you I’d be less worried about whether we’re fuckin’ and more about him starting a militia.”

Sierra scoffs. “Your entire career has been that soldier shit. You signed up for jet pack combat because jumping out of normal planes wasn’t enough for you. You just better make sure the civilians get covered, because we _didn’t_ sign up for that. You hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Good. When do I get to meet Mrs. America?”

“Jesus, never,” Sam says reflexively, unable to catch himself in time. “I mean. They’re not in the country at the moment.”

But it’s too late. _“They?”_ Sierra says dangerously.

“You wanna know so bad, _you_ ask Steve,” Sam says, holding up his arms in an X to show he is making like a crustacean and clamming the hell up. And the thing is - thing is, now that everything is no longer gunfire and airports and trying to figure out what the fuck language the packaging on your convenience store breakfast is even in, Sam’s been having… thoughts.

Some of them are extremely awkward thoughts, like the fact that Riley had also been six four, jacked as fuck, balls to the wall and a violent bastard to boot. He had a face like a car accident while Steve just looks like a sad pink pickaxe, but hell, Sam likes a couple scars on a dude. Riley had a fucking wicked one from his right jaw to his right eyebrow. It was from doing some incredibly dumb shit with a bike chain, an engine block and a bunch of fireworks, but the guy couldn’t help it, he’d grown up rural. If Riley hadn’t knocked out so many brain cells growing up he’d have passed on pararescue and grown up to be Tony Stark instead.

The thing is, Riley had always been happy. A ferociously, contagiously happy person. He had bad days, everybody does, but his fundamental Rileyness had been a rock solid core of optimism that it sometimes felt like nothing could touch. And Steve, bless him, has a whole fucking conga line of grief lined up behind him at any given moment and unlike Riley, Steve is very capable of mope. And Sam loves the guy, but he just can’t, couldn’t, especially not when on bad days he’s still dancing his own damn depression boogie.

But now, with Barnes back, with a plan, with Steve no longer cartwheeling along the edge of fucking killing himself, Sam is starting to get some serious tingles. In the pants. Of his heart.

Now, Sam is no stranger to tingles. He’s ridden the tingle train around the track a few times and back again. And while he knows he’s ride or die for Steve, he’s having a little trouble envisioning what actually, formally dating him would entail. Sam likes nice shit; Sam likes to be treated well. Riley once knocked on Sam’s door with a rose between his teeth, eyebrows waggling, and took him to Bourbon Steak and a sunset walk along the Georgetown waterfront. In Bagram the two of them had tangoed to the tinny sound of Riley’s iphone speakers, placed on the floor of a supply room they’d jammed the door of to give them some private time. And nothing against Steve, but the dude has the romantic sensibilities of a brick.

And all of that’s _besides_ the fact that they might be about to go to war with the United States government. Again. So Sam’s gonna have to approach this with his cards on the table, if he decides to approach it at all.

In the meantime, they’re still sharing pretty much everything, and it doesn’t feel weird to fall asleep in the guest bed with Steve drooling into his elbow. And when it comes to taking on federal agents and weird dudes who stalk his family - especially if they’re one and the same - there’s really no one else he’d rather have at his side.

And then there’s Barnes. Barnes, _Bucky_ Barnes, who had got him a whole ass Lamborghini, holy shit.

All of this speeds past in approximately two seconds, and Steve saves him from whatever the hell Sierra was gonna come out with next by poking his head through the front door. “Ready?”

“Coming,” Sam says, standing up quick and forcing Sierra to step back by opening the coat closet.

“Where’re you going?” she retaliates.

“We’re gonna see a buddy of mine,” Sam says. “Gotta get some anti-spy spy gear to make sure the next round of creepers get copped before they even make it down the block.”

Steve huffs, stepping inside fully. “I’m this close to just going out there and explaining what we used to do for countersurveillance on the front.”

“Why not?” Sam says, wrapping his scarf. “They want to play black ops in goddamn suburbia, we can fucking play.”

“I don’t think we can get away with executing an FBI agent in your backyard,” Steve says, after a brief glance at Sierra. “No matter how much of a peeping tom he’s being.”

“We don’t have to kill them to make their lives hell,” Sam says. “Besides, there’s all kinds of stuff we can do that doesn’t even count as torture. Bush and the Patriot Act and the guys at Gitmo all said so. And if it turns out he’s _not_ an FBI agent…”

Sierra’s eyes have narrowed, her face making the subtle yet significant transition from Sisterly Scowl No. 47, All Your Life Choices Are A Personal Embarrassment To The Family And You Are Destined To Crash And Burn, to Sisterly Smirk No. 4, You’re About To Do Something Evil And I Like It. “Bring back all the anti-spy shit they got,” she says. “And then show me how to use it.”

-o-

They go to Sam’s buddy’s house, a thirty minute drive to a sunbleached farmhouse in an even more hilly and woodsy chunk of Virginia. “Pittman,” Sam says. “I worked with him in Iraq. If he doesn’t already have what we need, he can get it.”

Pittman is short, wiry, white and sporting a leg of black plastic from the knee down, which doesn’t seem to slow him down any as he follows the approximately eight hundred dogs that come pouring out of the house as their car comes up the driveway. “Willy!” he yells as they get out of the car, straining dogs held by their collars in either hand.

“Pitty!” Sam shouts back, arms spread grandly as they advance, dogs swarming excitedly around them. “It’s fuckin’ December! The fuck you doin’ in shorts?”

“Tanning,” Pittman says cheerfully. “Who’s your friend?”

“I’m Steve,” Steve says. “I’d shake your hand, but -”

“Yeah, pet a dog instead,” Pittman says. “C’mon inside.”

Inside there are puppies. Pittman watches benevolently as they get mobbed, brown and black and grey doglets jumping up at Sam, Steve, the kitchen chairs, the door, the walls and each other. “Jesus, it’s like paparazzi,” Sam says, ruffling at two dogs at once, and Pittman laughs and starts herding them into a series of metal mesh enclosures that Steve assumes are the indoor dog habitat.

“So,” Pittman says, when all the animals are safely corralled and he’s wiping hair and saliva off on his shorts. “You said you needed some help?”

“We’re dealing with surveillance,” Sam tells him.

Pittman’s eyebrows snap together. “Surveillance,” he says. “What are are we talking here?”

“There was a guy in a tree outside my parents’ house. We took care of it.”

“A guy in a tree,” Pittman says, eyebrows together. “Bro, are you telling me you clapped a deer hunter?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “We didn’t clap shit. He and his partner were FBI. Badge and everything.”

Steve frowns. “Hunting deer in a _tree?”_

“Oh yeah man,” Pittman says. “It’s population control for the deer, there’s a county-wide program for it. Archery only, all regulated and shit.”

“He’s from Brooklyn,” Sam says apologetically.

“So any other people we see in the trees could be deer hunters?” Steve says doubtfully, lightly elbowing Sam for the slight against his heritage.

“Not really,” Sam says. “They usually use platforms and they’re not very high up. Plus the whole, orange vest, full camo look.”

“Yeah, and right now it’s weekends only,” Pittman says. He scratches his knee where it disappears into his prosthetic. “FBI, huh? I got a prototype bug sweeper. And the standard security stuff - CC feeds, motion detectors, the works. What are you looking for?”

“All of it,” Sam says.

“Do you have plantable cameras and mics as well?” Steve asks. Sam glances a question at him. Steve shrugs. “If they want to spy on us, surely they can’t protest us spying right back.”

Pittman sucks his teeth. “So I should file all the serial numbers off and wipe my prints before giving y’all anything, is what you’re telling me.”

“Yup,” Sam says. “And if anyone asks, the only thing we came to see you about is getting a guard dog.”

Pittman makes a face very close to a pout. “They’re therapy dogs.”

“Oh, right, I forgot _sic em_ is such a universally accepted assistance command,” Sam says dryly. Steve doesn’t miss the way most of the larger dogs perk up at the words, looking to Pittman.

“It’s therapeutic!” Pittman argues, grabbing a dog and ruffling its face at them. The dog’s tail thunders against the floor in canine ecstasy. “They’re great for therapy. They create safe spaces.”

“By eating everything that might qualify as unsafe,” Sam says.

“Sure you don’t want one?” Pittman says, picking up one of the smaller dogs and waggling its paw at Sam.

“Nah,” Sam says, straightening and jerking a thumb at Steve. “I got my hands full handling this one.”

“Oho, this your big titty blonde?” Pittman says, grinning at Steve. “Nice of you to finally introduce usssssssohhhh shit you’re Captain America.”

Steve raises his eyebrows at him, then gives an exaggerated glance down at himself and looks at Sam. “Do I want to know what you’ve been telling people?”

Sam looks positively blissful at this development. “I was wondering how long it would take,” he tells Pittman happily.

“You motherfuckin’ asshole,” Pittman says absently, eyes rapt on Steve, the dog still in his arms. “Okay, uh - Captain - I don’t wanna make it weird but since I already embarrassed myself out the ass here I’m gonna go ahead and say you were a big part of why I joined the Air Force and I read the Commando compilation and the original Falsworth journals and I just wanna say you’ve got steel ones, sir. Solid fucking steel. It’s an inspiration. And what you did in DC, sir, those motherfuckers deserved every inch.”

Steve sticks out his hand to shake. He can’t say he’s thrilled every time this happens but Pittman seems like a good guy and he’s helping them. It’s the very least Steve can do.

“Did you just tell Captain America his balls inspire you?” Sam says.

“It’s an honor, sir,” Pittman says, pumping Steve’s hand with the dog jiggling slightly in his other arm from the strength of the motions. He adds to Sam, “You will never ever ever be forgiven.”

“Hey, so long as you sell us the spy equipment,” Sam says equably. “I just hope you don’t want paid in anything besides cash, ‘cause yeah, no, you don’t wanna get implicated in the inevitable ‘who put livestream cameras in every FBI office urinal’ scandal.”

“Not _every_ urinal,” Steve says. “Not _all_ the FBI agents are complicit.”

Pittman looks at Sam, then back at Steve, then says “You know what? I don’t need to know. I’ll sell you the stuff and then I never saw it, I never saw you, I don’t even know who you are.”

“Smart,” Sam says, and Pittman, clearly trying to return to his pre-Captain America equilibrium, leads them to the garage and then down into a cellar fairly bristling with boxes of wires, monitors, cameras and what looks like every kind of radio in existence.

They load up. Pittman has Sam go out and repark the car out back, where they can back it up to the basement door. A marquee-style half-garage provides decent cover for the boxes they load into Sam’s trunk. Pittman shows them how to install and use the equipment - Steve has a rude understanding of how to plant bugs from the crash course given by Natasha, but stuff like motion detectors and actual security cameras is more involved - and then they stay for lunch, partially as a cover for what they’re doing and partially because Pittman shows them the honey mustard chicken he’s got marinating and threatens to eat it all by himself.

The dogs get turned loose again after they’re done eating, and Pittman shows them how one of them can open doors, turn a backflip, walk on its hind legs for a few feet and fetch the TV remote. Sam laughs outright as Steve makes duly impressed noises. It’s not that Steve doesn’t like dogs, or animals in general; he’s just a little unclear on the whole concept of pets. Bucky had always had some kind of natural inner bond with anything with fur, but whatever downmarket Snow White of Brooklyn insight he’d gotten had either skipped Steve entirely or gotten quashed early by all the allergies.

These days, though, Steve supposes Bucky’s mystical animal bond has been supplanted by a spaceship.

He snaps a few photos of the sea of dogs for Bucky anyway. Maybe Buck would like a dog? He’d always preferred cats, true, but that was because they were easier to pet and leave food for and Mrs. Barnes had always yelled at Buck a lot more for feeding street dogs. Buck would still do it, of course, even after getting bit a couple times, which Steve supposes is proof of some kind of affection. When Buck comes back and everything settles down maybe they’ll visit Pittman again.

It’s high time Steve started looking for a place to live. It’ll pull the FBI off the Wilsons some, and he promised Buck a roof with a view. With space for their extraterrestrial companion, anyway. Steve’ll find it. He’s got to visit Peg for the holidays too, soon; he’ll stop for some apartment hunting in Brooklyn along the way.

-o-

Barnes jolts awake to the highly unpleasant feeling of being physically manipulated and it takes him too long to realize that it’s secondhand - Motherfucker, it’s Motherfucker, it’s from the damn ship. He finishes falling out of the tree with a full awareness of who and where he is, which isn’t much of a consolation to the faceful of twigs he gets en route to the goddamn ground.

And Motherfucker’s still being - touched, moved? The shipping container must be getting unloaded, he realizes. That’s most likely it. He can’t tell exactly what’s going on, only that there’s alloy/alloy/something-that-looksfeels-like-spaghetti in contact with the hull of the ship, tugging it off somewhere with inconsistent pressure.

Barnes, who already generally wakes up to the thought that he’d be better off with his brain swapped out for a parsnip, does not find himself able to appreciate this marvelous new experience. He briefly entertains the thought of lasering off whatever it is that’s touching the ship, but that split second alone is enough to make Motherfucker perk up and so Barnes has to quash the happy thought ruthlessly so as not to accidentally barbecue some hapless dock worker.

Barnes drags himself back up into the tree. Once reinstalled, he automatically checks his phone for messages from Steve.

His eyes bug out slightly.  

“The _FBI?”_ he shouts a couple seconds later, nearly falling out of the tree again. Good thing he scared all the sleeping birds out of here with his first fall, because - _really?_ The _FBI?_ On the one hand, well, it’s not exactly the big leagues they’re dealing with, but on the other hand, _what happened to building a quiet civilian presence, Steven._

Barnes clutches the tree and tries to think sane thoughts. Steve’s definitely looped in the Widow for this. There’s no advice Barnes can offer that Widow won’t have given Steve, and she’s more current on the tactical landscape in any case. There’s nothing for Barnes to do about this, which is - good, it’s good, because Steve has other people better suited to help him with this clusterfuck and the best thing Barnes can do is not stick his presumed-dead wanted-terrorist-assassin nose into even _greater_ risk of detection by USA law enforcement.

So he just gets to sit here in this tree and vibrate with useless adrenaline.

Motherfucker picks up on it and nudges him in the brainstem, as sweet and helpful as a six thousand pound puppy with laser cannons for eyes. “Fuck off,” Barnes mumbles. “Lasers are not the answer.”

Motherfucker, without having anything so clear or cognizant as an opinion, still manages to radiate a hopefulness that conveys that lasers _could_ be the answer. Maybe. Sometimes.

“I’m going to put you in time out on the moon,” Barnes threatens under his breath, climbing back up to find a branch that most closely resembles a mattress.

-o-

On the way back from Pittman’s, Sam swings by the storage unit Mom and Dad put his stuff in when they cleared the house for the renters to move in. It’s not that much - they left the house furnished and even his amateur photography is still on the walls - but he’s looking forward to having more than four shirts in his wardrobe rotation. He’s pretty sure his old clippers are in there too, which are about to be critical gear given that Steve is starting to resemble a bleached-out shih tzu with erratic access to hairbrushes.

“You can’t go blackmail the FBI looking like that,” Sam tells him. “You need a haircut, c’mon.”

Steve runs a hand over his head like this is the first time he’s ever felt hair before. “That bad?”

“You’re starting to have capital B Bangs, dude,” Sam tells him. “Lucky for you, I got what you need.”

The boxes they picked up from the storage unit mask the boxes of equipment they got from Pittman. They take it all to the basement and repeat back the mini surveillance seminar they got from Pitty to Sierra, Mom and Dad; they’ll install them tonight after dark, when exactly what they’re attaching to the house exterior will be a little less visible. In the meantime, Sam snags a folding chair and hustles Steve back up to the garage.

“So we can toss your super-follicles directly in the trashcan,” Sam says, because this way his mom won’t frown pointedly when finding the single blond hair he fails to vacuum up in the kitchen. “What do you want?”

Steve shrugs, tugging on the plastic rain poncho conscripted to do duty as barber cape “Whatever gets it out of my eyes.”

“Dangerous words, my man,” Sam says, plugging in the clippers. “Sure you don’t want to add some caveats?”

“I trust you,” Steve says, turning big blue eyes on Sam. “Besides, I know where you sleep.”

Sam grins and flicks the clippers on. He gives Steve a high and tight, thirty percent because it’ll make Steve look like a Republican’s wet dream and seventy percent because it’s kinda the only haircut Sam knows how to give that isn’t full bald. He really is getting good at this spy stuff, he thinks, critically examining the very Support Our Troops, Into The Breach, Army Strong look Steve is now sporting.

Steve does his one-eye squint of amusement. “That bad?” he says again.

“Psyops is a go,” Sam says with satisfaction.

“What?”

“Now all we need is a uniform. Shit, do you have your uniform? Shit, you can’t - shit, you _can_ wear it, it just might look bad. After your whole ‘I’m a civilian, assholes’ and all.”

“Have you and Natasha been talking about this?” Steve says suspiciously.

“What, I can’t think this stuff through all by myself? I listen when she talks, yknow,” Sam says. “And this is about making an impression. Fuck, what am _I_ gonna be wearing.”

 _“You_ can wear the uniform,” Steve says.

“Yeah, but if _you_ don’t, it’s not gonna look right,” Sam says. “This is why you gotta get some PR people. They prolly got a whole team of people with degrees in this shit.”

Steve gets a sarcastic look on his face and holds an imaginary phone up to his ear. “Hello, wardrobe? What’s the recommended look for going to threaten an entire federal agency? Oh, pinstripes and tommy guns? Thank you.” He puts the imaginary phone back in its imaginary cradle. “They said to pin my Medal of Honor to a bandit kerchief and wear whatever’s got the biggest black and white stripes. They’re already treating us like criminals, Sam. It’s not gonna matter what we wear.”

“It always matters what you wear,” Sam counters. “We could do suits, I guess. Dunno if that’ll send the right message.”

Steve’s eyes narrow slightly. “Hmm,” he says.

-o-

Steve wears a blue checkered shirt and khakis belted significantly north of his bellybutton, so Sam has no choice but to put on his own plaid and chinos. Steve’s Tactical Grandpa decision means they end up looking like a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses whose day jobs involve a lot of time interacting with Bowflexes, which, alright, could be worse **.** They take Sierra’s car to DC, because Sam refuses to risk the Lambo falling to federal custody but also doesn’t want to freeze his nuts off riding bitch on the Harley. They pull up to the J. Edgar Hoover building twenty minutes ahead of the meeting time Hill sent them.  

Security doesn’t harass them, though they do get some wall-eyed looks upon producing ID. Someone gets sent to collect them, a baby-faced guy agent in bad slacks, and the looks get progressively stonier as they get led deeper into the drywall labyrinth. “Told you we should’ve gone for suits,” Sam says as they pass yet another knot of agents doing the federally-approved version of cooler gossiping. “We could’ve out-suited them.”

“Maybe you could,” Steve mutters back. “All I’ve got is that getup from the Congress hearings and I hear it’s gauche to wear the same dress to a party twice.”

They’re led to an open waiting area with chairs, all arranged around a door with _DIRECTOR_ on the nameplate. Government chic at its finest. “Someone will be with you shortly,” the baby agent says, with one last furtive look at Steve, and in fact they barely have time to sit down and trade looks before an entire group of the better-dressed kind of government worker is heading towards them.

Sam recognizes the director of the FBI in the middle, who stops mid-sentence when he catches sight of them. Sam struggles to remember his name - he read the wiki last night for exactly this reason, but jesus, the guy’s got one of those Polish last names with eighty consonants -  as the man’s lips thin and he tucks the folders he’s holding under his arm. “Excuse me,” he tells his entourage. “I’ve got to take this meeting. We’ll reconvene after lunch.”

“Director,” Steve says, standing and looming like a tanker full of C4 done up in plaid.

“Steve Rogers,” the director says, in the tones of a man who has recently discovered exactly what Captain America is all about. “And Samuel Wilson.”

“Just Sam,” Sam says blandly.

“Call me Steve,” Steve echoes, just as bland. “Thanks for meeting with us. Let’s get the situation with the Wilsons resolved so you can get back to your day.”

The director - Sam wonders how discreetly he can google the guy’s damn _name_ when the dude’s right in front of them, maybe there’ll be a nameplate on his desk or something - looks like he’s holding back a pretty intense case of lemon face. “What situation with the Wilsons.”

“Your assistant director of national security told us that they’re all on a no-fly list now,” Steve says. “And she spoke about opening an investigation. Retaliating against civilians who weren’t even involved seems over the line, don’t you think?”

The director’s lemon looks get a little sourer. “If we’re going to discuss details, let’s talk inside,” he says, gesturing joylessly to the open door of his office.

The office, in true D of C federal building fashion, has the ceiling clearance of a hobbit hole and the aesthetic grace of waste processing facility. It’s a lot of brown furniture, unpainted walls and the standard flags and crest set up behind the large desk where a normal person might have windows. The director strides over, tosses his folders down and sits, leveling an I-don’t-have-time-for-this look across at them. Naturally, Steve takes his time settling down into one of the guest chairs, and Sam can’t say he’s in any hurry either. (No nameplate. Damn.)

“The Wilsons,” the director says, eyeing the way Steve’s weight is making the chair creak slightly. “That’s what you want? Exoneration?”

“That implies that they committed a crime,” Sam says, a little sharper than he means to.

The director looks at him. “Son, I understand that they’re your family, but -”

“This has nothing to do with them,” Steve says. “Your national security head told us point blank it was retaliation for how we handled your agents’ spying on us. It’s not just unethical, it’s a waste of your agents’ time and resources.”

The director shuts his eyes briefly. “Rogers, we can’t _not_ spend time and resources on you. You’re _Captain America.”_

“So they’re being punished just because I stayed with them for Christmas?”  

The director looks very much like he wishes the God of Alcohol could exist so that he could sacrifice them to it in exchange for immediate whiskey blackout. “Rogers. We are less than a year out from an attempted coup that killed over seven hundred civilians, not to mention dozens of personnel from every security agency and several branches of the armed forces. On top of that, you’re the only supersoldier we’ve got that isn’t gibbering or green. You are _always_ going to be a factor in any terrorism threat assessment, and I would be failing to uphold the oath I took to protect the nation if I wilfully ignored that. The national security branch would be failing in their duty as well. Of _course_ anyone you stay with is going to be examined by the team assigned to you. Your personal feelings on the matter are not something we can afford to indulge.”

“Director,” Steve says, very level. The office, big as it is, abruptly feels entirely too small to contain the conversation. “This isn’t my first security rodeo **.** I’ve been under protective surveillance since the moment I woke up in a SHIELD bunker in 2011 wearing someone else’s underwear. SHIELD did a lot of things wrong, but they knew that keeping the subject in the loop on the security detail increases cooperation and makes their own agents safer. With all due respect, sir, who the fuck wrote your gameplan? Sending over your national security head to threaten the family that took me in on Christmas? What did you _think_ was going to happen?”

Director Mike sets his jaw. “Do you think I personally write up every security plan for every detail? This _situation_ was brought to my attention when you called my emergency line at nearly one in the morning.”

Steve cocks his head very slightly, which Sam understands as the alternative to him picking up the director’s chair and hurling it out the window. “‘I don’t know, sir. I assumed a case like mine would require certain standards of oversight, sir. After all, sir, I am your only supersoldier. It would be failing to uphold your oath to ignore my situation, sir. Is that what happened? You failing?”

Sam feels now is the time to remind everybody that they came here to get his parents off a terrorist watchlist, not _actually_ fistfight the FBI. Especially if he’s understanding the situation right and what the director wasn’t quite saying was that he _didn’t_ intentionally sign off on this whole willfully bullheaded clusterfuck. “We’d like to cooperate with you. Sir. It’s just a little hard to do when we can’t tell your agents from the HYDRA extremists and mercenaries who’ve been trying to kill us all year. It’s a little hard to trust a badge or a uniform these days.” Sam shrugs his most of-course-I’m-not-disagreeing-with-you-officer shrug. “You know how it is. The Bureau had to deal with HYDRA infiltrators in their ranks too.”

The director doesn’t look thrilled to be reminded of that, but as he opens his mouth to reply there’s a knock on the door and the look of rebuttal transforms into the universal What The Hell Does The Daycare I Generously Call My Office Want Now expression. “Open up, Mike,” a man calls, and the look morphs into surprise as the director stands up and goes to open the door - to let Colonel fucking Rhodes into the office, cover under his arm, looking like a man conscripted into picking up someone else’s kids from daycare. Sam scrambles to attention entirely on instinct, Steve not even a second behind him, both ripping off salutes on the basis that you don’t _not_ salute a superior officer when he’s got that look on his face.  

“Jim?” the director says, sounding as surprised as they are. “What brings you here?”

“You,” Colonel Rhodes says to him, checking his watch. “And this is eight minutes out of my already nonexistent lunch break that I won’t get back, so listen up. Mike,” he says, making hard eye contact with the director and jerking his chin at Steve, “just give him the damn agent roster. You want him on the inside pissing out, not outside pissing in, so make it happen before we’re all ankle deep in urine. Rogers.”

Rhodes swings his gaze to Steve. Steve’s spine straightens another half inch. Rhodes had been the one to open the Stark weapons warehouse doors when they came to him as blatant vigilantes; he’d helped them fake Barnes’ death. “Yes sir?”

“Cut that shit out.”

“Yes sir.”

“Great. Wilson, make sure of it. Be seeing you. Take care, Mike, say hi to Cheryl for me. Rogers? You owe me. Don’t forget it.”

“Not likely, sir,” Steve says, sounding like he means it, though Sam swears Rhodes rolls his eyes as he turns and walks back out the door.

Sam tries not to think about whether it’s a form of mild treason to wonder if Rhodes is single. He fails. By the look on Steve’s face he’s failing right along with him.

‘Mike’ doesn’t look thrilled per se with these developments, but at least he doesn’t look pissed as he watches Rhodes go. Steve stops looking at Rhodes’ back before Director Mike does, turning a cinderblock smile on him and sticking out a hand to shake. “Thank you for this opportunity for cooperation, Director. As soon as we resolve the situation with the Wilsons we’ll be out of your hair.”

Whatever good humor may have been unearthed by Colonel Rhodes’ visit returns to the graveyard it was buried in. Director Mike looks fatalistically at Steve’s offered hand and sighs. He takes it. “You’re just going to keep stirring shit until we give in, aren’t you.”

“I do whatever it takes to achieve the objective, sir,” Steve says with openly false sincerity.

“I meant what I said. We can’t afford to just wink and nod and turn our backs on you, Rogers. We have a duty.”

“Then let us help you do it,” Steve says, all the falseness dropping out of his voice and somehow making the sincerity sound like a threat. “So that this time around we all do it right.”

“Right,” Director Mike echoes, eyes narrowed. “In that case I suppose we’ll be in touch.”

“You have my number,” Steve says sweetly.

Director Mike glares and takes hold of the doorknob in a way that clearly indicates he’d love to slam the door on them; Sam and Steve take the hint and step back out into the waiting area. “Wait here. I’ll call someone to see you out.”

“Thanks for taking the time to meet with us,” Sam adds, on the basis that in this case it’s a bigger fuck you to be polite.  

Director Mike grunts and shuts the door in their faces with the maximum force permissible in an office setting. “Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to redirect my piss,” Steve mutters, and Sam nearly blows out a sinus trying to hold in the laughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- ch title from the little things by danny elfman yes i changed it this fit better and in this ao3 doc i am god
> 
> \- THANK YOU AGGRESSIVEWHENSTARTLED, QUIETNIGHT AND GALWEDNESDAY FOR THEIR USUAL HEROICS IN BETAING
> 
> \- ive never been inside an fbi building in my life, let alone the hoover headquarters, so its all made up and probably 100% wrong. who cares. i did like, two whole google image searches


	3. we got a warning light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if animals killing & eating other animals is a problem for you then skip as soon as it starts being about seagulls

The dog is following him. 

Barnes has been trekking wild more or less on purpose once he hit the coast, half because it’s still work to deal with civilians and half because it’s easier to hold Motherfucker in the back of his mind when he’s away from people. It’s better this way, he tells himself. Less chance of getting seen and recognized and reported to someone. He still goes into towns, for food or new socks or hair ties, but for the past half-dozen days he’s been sleeping in trees and bathing in the dozens of the warm, amazingly clear little riverlets that feed into the ocean.

Besides, it _is_ better this way. Nobody can sidle up to him and say any trigger words if he stays away from the crowds. It might not kill him, sure, but it’s not like it’ll be the start of anything great either. The words are loose in the world now, spread around, and Motherfucker isn’t half a mile away anymore. Neither is Steve. Barnes needs to keep his head down and look out for himself and make sure his valuable prep time isn’t interrupted by any attempted neonazi kidnappings. 

And now the damn dog is following him. It’s pretending like it’s not, hanging around a good hundred yards away, lolling under the scrubby trees or gamboling innocently in the surf. But it is. It’s definitely the same dog from that tree. He should never have fed it. Now it knows he’s got food and that he’ll part with it. 

He tries to ignore it, going about his normal business and grabbing for preoccupation with both hands. He’d worried about disrupting his nightly indoor bath routine, but the weather is so nice on this coast and the water of the streams so clear that he’s been able to adjust without too much sacrifice. He gets a vague memory of icy mud between his toes and a distinct sense of displeasure the first time he washes in a warm sandy-bottomed creek, along with a half-overlaid feeling of _thank god it’s not February in Poland._

It’s probably a safe bet that the majority of his outdoor bathing was done as Sergeant Barnes. Soldier did plenty of outdoor work with the Russians but they weren’t exactly slowing down to rinse their hair and drawers and the Asset saw daylight like once a fuckin’ year. This temperance is a decidedly new experience. It’s warm here, and his hair feels thick but somehow not overly sticky from the combination of sea breeze and freshwater scrubbing.

It’s the perfect environment to experiment. A little. 

Today his objective is to spend sunup to sundown with no boots on. There is no compelling reason why he should wear boots today. If some kind of attack of something does happen, he is perfectly capable of defending himself without boots. He wouldn’t want to, but he can. And the air is clear and the sea is calm and he can see for miles, so unless a tentacled monstrosity comes thrashing up out of the shallow crystal-blue surf the worst that’s going to happen to him is some sunburn. 

Barnes sternly sits himself down - his boots by his pack, laces untied and ready for emergency re-shoeing - and pulls up the book. 

The dog is getting closer. The beach ain’t no Malibu postcard; the sand is gravelly and becomes rocks just a few feet from the water, but there’s scrub and bushes and the occasional windblown tree. The dog wanders in and out of view, picking its way along with every sign of nonchalance, sniffing at random chunks of beach debris.

Barnes focuses on the book. Today it’s _Outside the Pharmacy: Holistic Strategies for Rebuilding After Trauma._ It’s for people who aren’t using drugs to treat their PTSD, for whatever reason. His reason happens to be that his metabolism is not compatible with more or less any chemical interventions found outside a Nazi laboratory, but it probably counts. 

It’s also only technically a book, in that it is a digital file on a digital screen. This makes it a huge fucking pain to read in the middle of bright beach sunlight. He has worked out a system: two chapters of brain book, one chapter of werewolf novel. Repeat. Currently the brain book is talking about the importance of community and how to get peace and quiet without becoming a fucking tree hermit on a mountain somewhere. 

According to the text, he is going to have to get himself some emotional support networks.

He doesn’t know how he feels about that. Steve isn’t a support network so much as he is a riot barricade, but even he can’t do everything all the time. Barnes is going to have to branch out. 

He does not want to branch out. Widow’s allied herself with him, anyway, and Wilson did offer him brain resources. That has to count. 

Maybe he’ll just skip this chapter. 

He checks his phone again before going back to the book. No new messages from Steve. 

Barnes really should delete that one photo. There’s nowhere near enough face in it for any facial recog tech to positively identify it as Steve, but they can’t afford to get sloppy. A rigid, joyless part of him sends needles of adrenaline down his spine every time he thinks about their opsec being compromised, and - he doesn’t know what to say. He’s sat hunched for hours over this phone, trying to put something, _anything_ into words. His rattlebox of memories submits useless notecards that say things like _Steve likes politics, Steve likes art, Steve likes Bucky._

Reading up on politics is probably going to send him to flashback city and leave him there, and Barnes has no idea where to even start with art. And as for _Bucky,_ well - he’s working on it. 

Steve wants to read books with him. Even really bad ones. 

Barnes is not sure how to feel about this. He _knows_ his recreational reading is shit. It’s not _meant_ to be anything else, it’s just there to be there, a comfortable, all-encompassing universe of bad writing that’s always ready to envelop him with open arms. And his _non-_ recreational reading is all books with titles like _Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain_ and _Struck By Lightning: A History of Keraunotherapy & the Effects of Electricity. _ And if Steve wants to read trauma books, he should start with the practical ones first: what to expect from somebody with brain damage. 

Barnes needs to get him those books. Steve might have said he doesn’t care what kind of mess Bucky is now and he might have meant it, but he still shouldn’t be unprepared. Bucky Barnes as he is now is only functional by the loosest and most generous of metrics, and some of that is straight biology, no help for it. Steve deserves to know what to expect.

Not that Barnes isn’t going to make an effort. If he’s going to be Bucky, he’s going to be a fucking good one. He is going to be the kind of partner Steve deserves. And Steve was right - he _wasn’t_ wiped out, his Buckyness isn’t gone. He just has to keep digging. He _knows_ exactly how to talk to Steve, how to make him laugh. The information’s just...misfiled. 

So he digs. They’d had - fun. Card games. Hangman. Poring over comic books, the garish colors and little boxes standing out even with the rest of the memory blurred into the generic browns of some cluttered apartment. They read books together - not the same one, they couldn’t do it like now - and talk and talk and talk and talk. 

They used to have _a lot_ of sex. 

Barnes is still trying to figure out how to balance on this particular unicycle. Steve, judging by the memories, thought sex was a sport and treated it like he was training for the olympics. If Bucky had - Barnes squints inward - boxing, swimming… then Steve had his dick. And Bucky’s dick. And various other assorted bits of Bucky. 

Pretty much all of them, frankly. Jesus Christ. 

Bucky Barnes, 2016 edition, is personally a little alarmed by the idea of having penis in his mouth, even if it is Steve’s. He’s hazier about the whole cock in ass business, though mostly because Bucky’s memories of all that are thoroughly marinated in a cloud of steaming pink embarrassment. He’d enjoyed it, that was clear, though the enjoyment was all tangled up in a mire of humiliation cut with the thrill of trespass and guilt. The resulting mess of conflicting pleasures is what’s left for Barnes to pick through: did he like it because he wasn’t supposed to, or what? Because it was illegal, and this was a cheaper thrill than boosting cars or boozing in back alleys? Because everybody thought Steve was the fairy but here was big strong James Barnes biting a pillow for Steven Grant Shortass and coming buckets from it too? Because of some godforsaken biological reason having his asshole occupied worked on an ‘insert coin, produce erection’ basis? 

At least Steve’s dick wants him, he’s almost very sure - him as he is now, hairy and heavy and half inside a starship’s head. Steve _said_ he wants him, and he meant it, and it’s like armor, surrounding the soap bubble conviction that he can do this. Be alive again.

And they’ve _had_ sex, here in the future. And it had gone right, or at least as well as anything could have gone given the circumstances. Steve had been asleep, true, and Barnes had been at risk for massive blood loss and further internal trauma, but nothing actually _bad_ happened.

He refuses to think at all about sticking his own dick anywhere near Steve. He remembers what happened with the Hillary hair girl. He still doesn’t know if the episode had been real, if he’d raped some similar-looking Asian woman or just killed her, if the memories were _memories_ or just his hallucination-happy brain mixing up an extra special stress cocktail to launch directly into his flashback. It’s not like it hasn’t cooked up worse. It’s fully possible some Bucky sex got mixed up with some Soldier strangling, and one day he’ll stop being so much of a coward and dig in to find out. 

Not today. 

Movement catches his eye. He can’t identify what it is at first, but then the strange image resolves: a tiny crab is industriously dragging a piece of seaweed four times bigger than itself. 

He looks at its scrabbling spindly crab legs. Then he looks at his phone. Then he thumbs open the camera. 

He promised Wilson to send stupid Steve photos, but so far he’s mostly been on the receiving end of the photography exhibits. He sends Steve his proof of life pictures, which even he knows are generic at best. He did consider taking some photos of the dog, but he’s still hoping it’ll fuck off and in any case it prefers to taunt him from a distance. The group chat (Marlene, Mae, Ginger and Fred, installed on a messenger relay service. Widow had apparently loved his codename and assigned others accordingly. She was Fred.) doesn’t have much in it currently beyond the string of emoji Widow sent to initialize it, but now’s his chance to uphold his end of the bargain. 

He zooms in on the crab and wonders vaguely if Wilson has received his compensation car yet.  

-o-

It’s a sideways sort of return to normalcy, between slathering Mom and Dad’s house with countersurveillance equipment and establishing their new relationship with the FBI. It’s no surprise to Sam that the feebs extend their warm hand of cooperation and sharing with as much pettiness as possible. They get told that if they want their agent roster and briefing then they better show up at a branch office in Maryland, seven o’clock sharp, and even before Sam plugs the address into Google maps he knows getting there is gonna be a very special slice of the standard DC traffic hell. 

“Hours in cars, checking everything for bugs, lowkey doing a buncha crime,” Sam says, as they crawl onto the beltway in tandem with the watery sun creeping over the horizon. “It’s like we never left Europe at all.”

“What kind of crime are we accused of now?” Steve asks, focused on picking at the tiny plastics and wires in his lap.

“Conspiring against the government,” Sam says, shooting Steve a glance. “At least, I assume that’s why you’re messing with one of Pitty’s mini mics there.” 

“There might not even be an opportunity to plant it,” Steve says, in a demure voice that says he’s going to make damn sure there’ll be an opportunity. 

Sam snorts. “Sure. Just let me know when you want me to moon the agents for a distraction.”

They get to the branch office three minutes early, and clearly everybody’s expected them down to the damn janitors. The agents are all real fucking weird about it. Half of them won’t stop staring - Sam’s gonna call them as the usual staff for this branch office - and the other half look pissed, handing over folders that they refuse to allow out of the room. It’s not a problem for Steve: he just stands and staidly flips through sheet by sheet, faster than possible for him to be reading it, and Sam can almost hear the _click_ every time Steve’s super serum neurons take a mental snapshot, memorizing every page. 

As power moves go it’s not bad. Doesn’t leave much for Sam to do, though, so he settles for pointedly relaxing and making coolly satisfied eye contact with every agent while deciding to make Steve sit down and reproduce each file verbatim the second they get home. 

And hey, he might as well give Steve that opportunity for bug-planting. “Hey, that a Hokies ring?” Sam says, nodding towards one of the agents across the table. “What year did you play? I did track myself, but most of my buddies did football…”

They finish without incident. Sam doesn’t see Steve plant anything, but he’s busy not looking so that he can hold nice honest eye contact with the feebs instead. The small talk wasn’t even as forced as it could’ve been. The agents obviously sent over from headquarters might just be pissed because their bosses sent them here at ass o’clock just to pull a power move, but maybe not. Sam knows how group loyalty works; your buddy might be a royal fucking headass, but he’s still your buddy. That shit can be dangerous. 

They get stared at again on their way out, which Sam figures he better start getting used to again, now that they’re back in America where a bunch of people actually recognize Steve. And Steve’s in a weird-ass space, celebrity-wise. There’s this freaky mix of Uncle Sam cartoon and after-school special and five-star General combined with the fact that Steve is a massive white dude with a face that’s culturally programmed to push compliance buttons. And, yes, the dude is hot. And big. The result is that if Steve walked into a Starbucks and said “I need volunteers to storm a terrorist stronghold armed with nothing but these coffee stirrers,” half the people in there would stand up. When Steve asked SHIELD agents to kamikaze themselves on the vastly more prepared HYDRA agents, _they did._

It also means that the de la Rojas, who live on the right side of Sam’s parents, and the Prejciewsckis, who live on the left side, definitely know that’s Steve Rogers shoveling the Wilson driveway, but haven’t called anybody because they’re decent people and they like feeling in on the secret. And other indicators of Steve’s presence - like his Harley - can be hidden under a tarp or stuck in the garage. The Lambo, too - customized down to the red leather seats - arrived long enough before Sam and Steve came to stay that it’s not a big red flag.

Besides, it’s one hundred percent his mom’s Lambo now. Sam’s honestly not sure what else he expected to happen.

“You _can_ reproduce those files, right?” Sam says as they pull back into the driveway. 

“You doubting my artist credentials?” Steve says dryly, handing the keys back to Sam. “I can even put the FBI logo on them if you like.” 

“Hey, you do however those artistic credentials move you,” Sam says as they open the front door and immediately get a faceful of Barf. 

“I should go up to New York soon,” Steve says as he uses every ounce of his superserum wits and strength to keep his face free of dog slobber. “Visit Peg, start looking for a place. Give Natasha a copy of the files too, she said it’d be easier to meet up with her in the city.” He glances over at Sam from behind Barf’s furiously wagging tail. “You wanna meet her? Peggy, I mean.”

“Sure,” Sam says, warmed. “Is that gonna be okay? Is she…”

“She does fine with new people,” Steve says, flashing him half a smile as he untangles himself from Barf. “It’s not like you expect her to remember you.” 

Ouch. “Cool,” Sam says, rubbing his hand up the fuzzy back of Steve’s head as he passes by. “I’ll help you find a place that isn’t an exhibit from the Tenement Museum.”

 “And it’ll give the agents on our detail a little field trip,” Steve says musingly. “I’m sure they’d love a chance to see the greatest city in the world.” 

 _“Oh_ yeah,” Sam says, grinning. “Let’s have the FBI rack up some miles.”

It’s good to see Steve on the ball again, even if it is driven by guerrilla warfare and spite. And he really does have to get himself a place. Sam does too, because Mom has started giving him chores again. 

Steve, of course, is thrilled, because he was clearly some penitence-obsessed monk in a past life and if he doesn’t get as many walkies as Barf does he _will_ start chewing on the walls. Mom asks them to clean up the garage - well, she asks Sam, but it’s not like Steve is gonna turn down an opportunity for manual labor. “It’s the least I can do,” he tells Mom, his eyes big and blue and honest as a brick. Sam fully expects to shunted off the will in favor of Aryan Dream here any day now, especially now that Steve’s started helping Mom with her couponing. 

He gets really into it, too. Mom still won’t stop mentioning how their last three grocery hauls each cost less than twenty dollars. “It’s the least I can do, ma’am,” Steve had repeated, hamming like a pig in a bacon factory. “With how I eat and all.” 

“Oh honey, don’t you worry about that,” Mom said, right before turning to Sam and making a pointed comment about how the garage is just _full_ of his old stuff from college and wouldn’t it be nice if they could get a little space back. 

So that’s how they end up in here, digging through boxes of little league soccer cleats and dusty fishing tackle. “What _is_ this,” Steve mutters, digging out one of Sierra’s ancient Hello Kitty rollerskates, the nauseatingly pink and white patterns long gone grey and congealed into a single chunk of cheap plastic.   

“The fulcrum of American childhood,” Sam tells him, taking the skate and chucking it in the trash-trash pile. “Or at least Sierra’s childhood. At least ages seven to nine. Just chuck it all if it’s kid stuff, it’s all gonna be too grody for hand me downs.” 

Steve nods and absently mouths _grody_ to himself, excavating more crap from the mess of boxes like an archaeologist realizing that the vast and abundant site they’re mining is actually just a Mesopotamian Walmart. They pull up a bunch of deflated basketballs, some Little League baseball stuff, a box of extremely battered Bratz dolls and like ten pairs of child-sized cleats, along with a skateboard.

“Oh, that’s Sierra’s too,” Sam says when Steve mutely holds it up. “I forgot she used to skateboard. I mean, I say used to. What I mean is she read some book where the main character skateboarded and got obsessed and then forgot about it two months later.” 

“Huh,” Steve says. “So you just stand on this?” 

“Yup. Knock yourself out.”

It takes Steve a couple tries to stand on it properly, but five minutes later he’s sculling back and forth across the available garage floor like a pro. “Wonder how fast you can go on one of these,” he muses. “Maybe if you held onto the back of a car you could get pretty fast.” 

“Sometimes Sierra would hold onto the back of my bike,” Sam says. 

They look at each other. Then they look across the room, where Steve’s Harley has been parked on one side of their spare garage spot. 

“We shouldn’t,” Steve says. 

“Now _that_ would be _fast,”_ Sam says. 

“I mean, not that we’d go on the highway or nothing,” Steve says. 

“Yeah, just around the block.”

They look at each other again. Then they look out the garage windows. “Hey,” Steve says. “You wanna give the spooks something to report about?” 

“Hell yes,” Sam says fervently. 

“You should be on the bike,” Steve says. “Can you drive a motorcycle? If we crash I can walk it off faster.” 

“Hell yeah I can drive a motorcycle. And we’re not gonna crash.” 

It takes fifteen minutes and a couple of bungee cords, but Sam gets the bike out of the driveway with Steve hanging on, clipped to the end via bungee hook. It’s not bad, actually. Steve’s bike is a monster and it takes a little bit of doing to figure out how to handle it properly, but they get it going and it’s actually pretty fuckin’ dope when -

_“Samuel Thomas Wilson!”_

Sam doesn’t exactly jerk the handlebars, but the bike wobbles just enough as they hit the culdesac turn that Steve gets very gently slingshotted into the Garcias’ holly bushes. Across the street Mom is standing on the porch, Barf on a leash, looking like that one painting of Medusa Sam saw in his middle school textbook only with a North Face fleece, floral head wrap and yoga leggings.

It takes Sam only a couple minutes to extract Steve from the holly, by which time Mom has moved only to fold her arms and shift her weight into that particular stance that promises nothing but regret. She just watches as they straggle up the driveway, Steve pushing the motorcycle along and Sam holding the bungee cords and skateboard in front of himself like a shield.

Mom’s eyes narrow as they shuffle to a stop in front of the garage. “Not even a helmet?” 

“I… don’t have one,” Steve has to admit, and Sam closes his eyes. 

-o-

“So,” Mom says. She’s tapping her nails on the kitchen table. Sam tries not to wedge himself too noticeably into Steve’s side while still trying to harvest his aura of chagrined innocence. “I seem to remember,” Mom says, steadily, “that you told me you need to get yourself a good public image. Because your friend who did a lot of shady business -”

“Shady- _looking_ business,” Sam tries. “He’s innocent. Mostly.” 

“- is coming back to the States.” Mom gives him the _interrupt me one more time_ look. “And now you’re doing this.”

“We’re sorry,” Steve chimes in, cranking his eyes as blue as they go. “We didn’t think it through.”

“Oh, I know you didn’t think it through,” Mom says, still looking at Sam. “Talk to your aunt.” 

“Which aunt?” 

“You know which aunt! You wanna mess around cracking your head open with motorcycles, you better make some money doing it!”

“Oh,” Sam says. “That aunt.” 

-o-

Sam has five aunts, technically, only he usually forgets about Aunt Niquai. So do the rest of the cousins. Aunt Niquai might be his mom’s stepsister but she is not an aunty. Aunt Niquai does not cook, clean, compromise or come to Thanksgiving. Aunt Niquai has met Beyoncé. Aunt Niquai lives in LA and closes sponsorship deals all day long for a living. 

Sam does not get the chance to call her. She calls him. “Hi Aunty,” Sam answers, trying not to squeak. The first time he met Aunt Niquai he’d taken one look at her looming in the front doorway and burst into tears, which in his personal opinion isn’t mitigated any by him being four at the time. 

“Sam,” Aunt Niquai says. She also doesn’t do small talk. “Darlene tells me you’re interested in doing some charity work.”

That throws Sam completely. “Charity?”

“Of course. A few of the brands I work most closely with are gearing up for their annual fundraising event. This year’s proceeds are going to veterans’ organizations, with a focus on medical bills and mental health.” 

“Oh, cool,” Sam says. “That’s cool. I can call some of my counselor buddies -”

“The event is a series of competitions. Extreme sports.”

Sam stares at the wall for a while. “...Like…”

“Motocross. BASE jumping. Parachuting. Aerial-drop snowboarding.”

“Oh,” Sam says weakly. “And… what… kind of brands?”

“Redbull. Puma. GoPro. And a few others.”

“....oh.” 

“Everyone’s looking for a good social responsibility edge this year, and I took the liberty of floating your name. Redbull’s definitely on board, GoPro as well. The event is going to be four cities over nine days, end of February. You interested?” 

-o-

“So… Redbull wants to sponsor me,” Sam says slowly. 

Steve, who’s been guiltily sorting through Mom’s fresh stack of coupons while she sits with her feet up and makes casual remarks about how helpful and sweet he’s being, visibly tries to place the reference. “Is that... good?”

“Not... sure,” Sam says. 

“I think it’s a _great_ idea,” Mom says archly. “I told you. You wanna try and crack your head open riding motorcycles on skateboards, you better be getting paid. Healthcare in this country is expensive.” 

Sam winces. Steve looks from her to him. “What do they want you to do?”’

“There’s a… charity marathon thing. It’s gonna be,” Sam sighs, “extreme sports.”

Steve raises his eyebrows. “Like UFC fighting?”

Sam can’t help but grin a little. “I gotta admit, I still think better you than me, but hey, if the spandex fits…”

Steve looks down at the coupons, that thinking wrinkle between his eyes. Then he looks back up at Sam. “Let’s do it.”

Sam’s eyebrows go up. “You want in on this too?”

“I’m not gonna muscle in on your deal,” Steve says, carefully neatening the stacks of coupons. “But I need to get myself some good press, and this sounds like a way to do it that ain’t kissing politician -” he catches himself last second, glancing at Mom - “butt. And I don’t think there’s many brands that would say no to bringing on Captain America.”

There aren’t. Sam calls Aunt Niquai back, feeling the opposite of grown while asking the equivalent of “Can my friend come?” by telling her Captain America is interested in joining him. And honestly - he’s been a professional badass for almost ten years at this point, but there’s still a part of him that’s fourteen and still losing its mind over meeting Colonel Rhodes and having a secret handshake with Captain America.

Thankfully, Aunt Niquai’s adult enough to keep it professional for both of them. “You’re in,” Sam tells Steve under Mom’s approving eye. “She’ll fax us the contracts tomorrow and we can look it all over before we sign.”

“We can send them to Bernie,” Steve says, adding to Mom, “She’s my lawyer. And I’m not in jail yet, so you know she’s good.” 

“She did say it’ll be a lot of press,” Sam warns, mostly just to see Steve make the toddler-presented-with-steamed-broccoli face. “More now that we’re on board, definitely.”

Steve shrugs. “Better than talk shows.”

 “And hey,” Sam says, a thought occurring to him. “If the feebs think New York gonna be a vacation… let’s see them chase us to Switzerland.”

-o-

The next time Barnes looks up from his book, the dog’s disappeared again. He squints at the beach for nearly an entire minute, until finally he sees it: it’s crouched sniper-still by a spill of rocks to his right, its big ragged bat ears pointing straight up like antennas. On top of the rocks are nearly a dozen nesting seagulls. 

And the dog isn’t so still either. Barnes watches, fascinated, as it creeps forward, inch by glacial inch. The seagulls mutter and preen but as far as Barnes can tell they have no idea the dog is right below them. Its stalk is patient, easy, its focus complete. Barnes watches it sidle in for nearly thirteen uninterrupted minutes, edging closer and closer until with no warning it launches itself up like a jack-in-the-box full of teeth.

Barnes actually jerks as the dog leaps, almost missing the moment. The seagulls scatter, shrieking, but too late - the dog got one, landing on the opposite side of the rocks with a wildly flapping bird in its mouth. It whips its head until the bird’s neck breaks and it goes limp, then drops it and jumps back up onto the rocks. Barnes watches it happily crunch down the seagull eggs, its tail wagging as it ignores the gulls’ infuriated screams. 

The gulls aren’t done, though. Barnes watches them recover from the shock and divebomb the dog, squalling and beating with their wings. The dog whirls on them, snapping right back with its egg-strung jaws and catching one of them by the wing. It whips its head again and kills the gull even as it retreats, pecked and buffeted by the others, and after a risky pause to grab up the first dead gull in its mouth the dog hightails it up the beach. 

And right towards Barnes. The gulls follow it, shrieking fury, and don’t pull up in time when Barnes reflexively scrambles to his feet. The dog zips behind him, which _of fucking course_ puts every seagull on a crash course trajectory with Barnes’ fucking face. 

Barnes, executing a record-time tactical assessment, runs for his fucking life.  

The next twenty minutes should be classified as a war crime. The gulls, clearly sleeper agents or at the very least Nazi sympathizers, have the advantage of aerial assault and absolutely no concept of mercy. The dog, which is also very clearly a manifestation of the devil’s will on this earth, alternates between attacking any bird in reach and ducking behind Barnes’ legs for cover. Barnes just wants to grab his backpack and shoes and get the fuck _out_ of here, because when he pulled out his knives and stabbed at a divebombing gull all it got him was a faceful of feathers.  

It’s a squawking eternity of chaos before he finally snags up his pack, kicks his boots into hand and books it away from the fucking water, swearing under his breath about how _the one fucking time he takes his boots off_ all of nature itself fucking turns on him. The dog paces him in seconds, its mouth full of seagull, galloping just ahead of him like it knows where they’re fucking going. “That better be one of the dead ones,” Barnes snaps, heading for the trees. 

They’re deep in the woods by the time the screaming of the gulls fades into the distance. The dog’s trotting along beside him, head held high to keep the dead seagull’s outflung wing from catching on the ground and giving it an air of jaunty little serial killer. “This is all your fault,” Barnes tells it, which of course makes the dog skip away from him like it thinks he’s going to _steal_ it.  

“You couldn’t _pay_ me to touch that,” Barnes growls at it, thumping down his pack and throwing himself down on a patch of moss between tree roots. Chased out of camp by _seagulls._ Jesus fuck. 

It occurs to him that now he _does_ have something to tell Steve, even if it isn’t exactly flattering. But it’ll make Steve laugh. Probably. Barnes can figure out how to tell it in a funny way. It can’t be that hard. It’s _seagulls._  

The dog fucking sniped them. Barnes should have taken his phone out to photograph or even film. Steve’s not gonna believe him.

Then the dog starts eating. 

Barnes immediately revises his opinion. There is absolutely no way he is making any record of this. The bones crunching is bad enough without all the flying feathers and awful chewy gristly noises. It’s like watching a frag grenade go off in slow motion. The dog tears into the bird like it’s an extra in a zombie movie, doing its best to make it into the B-reel footage. Barnes is grateful for not having eaten yet this morning because whatever he would’ve had in his stomach would’ve been launched right back up to join in with this fucking gore fest.

The dog pauses, horks, regurgitates what looks like a ball of blood and feathers and then immediately starts chomping again. 

“I need a priest,” Barnes says faintly. “ _You_ need a priest. This is _unnatural.”_

Then it occurs to him that maybe the dog _shouldn’t_ be eating a bird. Dogs eat literal, actual feces. They have no concept of ‘good for them’. There are tiny bones and things inside birds. The dog could choke. 

Barnes would rather eat toenail clippings than touch the drool-spattered, dripping, doubtlessly diseased bird burger trapped between the dog’s paws, but he doesn’t fucking know the Dog Heimlich and if it starts fucking choking the last thing he wants is a dead goddamn dog on his hands. Some things aren’t a choice. Maybe he can pry it away with a stick or something. 

He stands up, grimacing, and takes a step towards the dog. 

The dog doesn’t growl. It just stops gnawing and lowers its head and looks at him. It’s a very clear-cut look, informing him that if he takes a step closer it’ll be him that needs the Heimlich. It’s a look that says _try it._  

Barnes doesn’t try it. He sits back down. The dog starts gnawing again. Its tail wags. 

Barnes gives in. At least it’s not another spaceship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- ch title from timebomb by beck

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] come as you are](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20072038) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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